4 replies to this topic

[LSudlow]

56.56 is available at Guru3D and I assume Pieter will publish a modded inf soon. It's the first of the so-called Foreceware 55 drivers available (as was the elusive version 56.54). It comes with a warning that UT2 will perform poorly until nVidia publishes an updated driver in March.

3DMark01 and 3DMark03 scores are virtually identical with those from 56.55 and are slightly slower than scores from the 53.xx series. I suspect this due to the lack, in the 56.xx drivers, of the Direct3D MipMap speed/Quality slider that has been available in nVidia drivers for many generations. The new ones are locked on "quality" MipMaps unless tweaked with something like RivaTuner. I suspect that if the "performance" setting were still available, 3DMark scores would be virtually identical with the 53.xx series.

Two bugs are noteworthy: My Dell Inspiron 5150 is set to "do nothing" when the lid is closed, which means the machine should not shut down, hibernate, or go into stand-by. However, the screen's backlight should shut off, as it has with all earlier generations of nVidia drivers. Unfortunately, with the 56.xx drivers, the backlight remains on when the lid is closed.

Another bug spotted by one of our forum members is that DirectX Video Accleration fails to survive Stand-By mode. If you watch a DVD, then stop it and put the machine into Stand-By mode, you will not be able to view the DVD when the machine wakes up. The only workaround is to re-boot, which of course defeats the purpose of Stand-By mode. I haven't confirmed whether this happens in earlier drivers or not, and it may well be a DirectX bug, not a driver bug.

Anyway, here are my 3DMark scores for the past few driver versions:

Driver............3DMark01.............3DMark03
53.03............6963.....................1335
53.04............6965.....................1332
53.06............6976.....................1333
53.30............6940.....................1335
56.55............6744.....................1306
56.56............6731.....................1304

Machine: Dell Inspirion 5150
BIOS: A31
CPU: 3.06 GHz Pentium 4M (Non HyperThreading)
RAM: 512MB
GPU: Nvidia FX Go5200 w/ 64MB RAM
OS: XP Pro

[®®®]

thanks Larry!!
a good piece of work you did. Nice summary of all issues which where discovered during the last days.

To make information on "ForceWare v2" and nView complete i copy&past some infos from guru:

Application/game profiles-image quality and performance settings can be defined and saved for each application. Profiles launch automatically when the program is initiated. Adjustments can be made easily to any existing profile.
Mouse-over pop-up help for all graphics control panels-an integrated help function provides pop-up explanations of all graphics-related settings.
Drop-down menu for NVIDIA settings-a new menu item on the right-click drop-down menu takes users directly to a control panel for NVIDIA graphics settings.
The latest NVIDIA nView™ 3.5 software-a new nView multi-display wizard speeds the set up for multi-display modes. nView 3.5 also provides numerous enhancements for more efficiently using a single display including an improved pop-up blocker and enhanced display grid technology for organizing windows on your desktop.
Easy output of video files to television-when selecting a video file for output, a simple right-click on the mouse pops up a menu to speed start up and simplify the selection of video output options.
Introduction of PCI Express- support for the latest PC bus enabled through NVIDIA UDA.

btw NV and ATI are working on the first PCI-express GPUs which will arrive second half of 2004 (look here: http://forums.laptop...?showtopic=277)

[mobilenvidia]

Yes, I've got the modded INF up.
I've been very busy with the Forum shift with Teraphy (didn't go as smooth as I had hoped, but life is like that)

I havn't even had a chance to try the drivers yet.


Enjoy,


Pieter.

[LSudlow]

Thanks, guys. And to add another follow-up, Feng reports that the loss of DirectX Video Acceleration is new to the 56.xx series and worked fine with previous drivers.

I do like the new interface features, but this generation seems a bit buggy so far. I imagine we'll see refinements to this series in the coming days.

[mobilenvidia]

The 'Hardare accelleration' setting doesn't work.
I have a feeling this might have something to do with it.


And 'Extension Limit' doesn't work either yet.

Also using Setup.exe doesn't allow the driver to be removed easily

Other than that these 56.5x arn't too bad for me, I'm using 56.55 for my everyday use partition.


Pieter.