Hi all. There is a new nVidia driver 30.30 over at the guru site [www.guru3d.com]for anyone interested. My 3DMark2001SE marks went up by 700 with them. Have not flown with them yet but that isn't bad for openers..System: MSI 694 D Pro-2 Dual PIII @ 1G 1024 PC133 RAM Visontek geForce3 TI-500, 64 M DDR TurtleBay Santa Cruz Sound Saitek X-36 USB WindowsXp HomeEd Green, [email protected]

Ed,If you really want a treat, try the Omega Driver at http:www.omegacorner.com. It is based on the 29.42, but produces an amazing increase in image quality while the FPS stays the same or slightly increases. Easier to use too, as you don't need to fool around with tweaking tools anymore.Good luck.

HiyaIt says :THESE DRIVERS ARE SLOWER THAN NVIDIA ORIGINALS!!!you can loose 7fps well it may not matter on some programs but on FS it may be 50% of the frame rate?Did you notice this drop down?Thank you ,Alpha xxxxxxxxx

Alpha,No decrease noted. Mine FPS actually went up considerably because you turn off tri-linear and/or anisotropic filtering. I also dropped my FSAA down from Quincunx to x2 mode. Don't need it with this driver!! P.S. The "other" flightsim site is raving about this gizmo.Good flying,

Ed,A very interesting benchmark result. I have been wondering for sometime what these drivers would deliver. Even more interesting is that you have a Geforce 3 card, not a Geforce 4 card. Further proof that current and subsequent driver releases are still influencing the performance of earlier cards. Of course, if everyone suddenly starts to get better benchmark scores with this driver, we have to ask ourselves why. Did Nvidia bias the drivers just to give a great benchmark score? Has the image quality suffered, etc? Or are we actually getting beter performance with absolutely no side effects.Sorry, but I have to ask - as that 700 point improvement still seems too good to be true. After installing the new driver, did you restore your D3D registry settings to the exact same settings you had when you ran the old driver? For example, just changing the LOD and aniso settings by a small amount can cause dramatic variations in scores. Installing a new driver usually resets the registry back to default Nvidia settings so I am just wondering.

Ed,You might need to double check your results, as I have just run a series of tests that seem to indicate there is no performance improvement on the 30.30 dets using a Geforce 3 Ti card. I realise you run a Ti 500 and I run a Ti 200 but the main difference between the cards is simply clock speeds. Therefore, there shouldn't really be much *relative* difference to any recorded improvement. I notice the registry entries have changed since the 29.42 drivers. The D3D entries no longer have the "D3D_" prefix, but otherwise are the same. So unless you go into the registry and check the key names, the score will be too high if you are testing LOD and aniso settings. Here are my results on a Pentium III 933 @ 933 and a Geforce 3 Ti 200 at stock speed:1. Driver: 29.42 @ 1152 x 864 x 32. No aniso: 4975 2. Driver: 30.30 @ 1152 x 864 x 32. No aniso: 4977 3. Driver: 29.42 @ 1152 x 864 x 32. Level 4 aniso: 4000 4. Driver: 30.30 @ 1152 x 864 x 32. Level 4 aniso: 4003 5. Driver: 29.42 @ 1152 x 864 x 32. Level 8 aniso: 3580 6. Driver: 30.30 @ 1152 x 864 x 32. Level 8 aniso: 3577 Based on these results, the new drivers show no improvement in speed for Geforce 3 cards. So I seriously doubt these drivers make much difference with Geforce 3 cards when the same type of registry settings are used, as as the case above. It will be very interesting, however to see Geforce 4 results.

Hi Ed,I just read this thread. I did not know abaout these drivers before. As I am guy who has to take any chance to mess up his system I downloaded the Omega drivers immediately.From my first look the are incredible. Looks like 64 aniso. Shimmering textures that I had a lot are reduced to an absolute minimum. Especially the textures that are farther away look crisp and sharp. I can only suggest to everybody to try these driver. I could not notice a serious hit in framerates. I did not fiddle around with drver settings. I just used the default settings and started FS2002. My card: GF4Ti4600Try them!!!Thx Ed!!Alex

Hi Jon. I can only tell you what I did. I ran 3DMark2001SE, got the results, downloaded and installed the drivers and ran the benchmark again. I thought that the results were significant enough to report, but I am probably the last person in the world to be able to explain them. The card is new, as is the second processor. I had run the benchmark prior to installing the 2nd processor and as, as pretty much others have commented, there was no significant difference between the benchmarks (they stayed right around 2450-2475-- this was with a geForce2 MX400 64M SDRAM installed and the 29.80 drivers.) I then installed the geForce3 Ti 500 64M DDR and ran the benchmark again and got 4275 with the 29.80 drivers. I then installed the 30.30 drivers, ran the benchmark and got 4993.Best RegardsEd Green, [email protected]

Hi,I am also using 30.30 driver. The result is very satisfactory though it still need to be tweaked with Riva Tuner. With LOD level -.8 and 4 tap Anisotrophic filter, the image is the most crispy ever at the minimum frame rate hit. GTU seems not support Detonator driver newer than 29.42.Speaking of Omega driver, appreciate clarification as to the result. Do you get similar good image without above tweaks ??Thank youYukiAthlonXP 1700+Geforce 3 Ti200 (O/C to 192/400)Detonator 30.30Riva tuner

Yes, in my opinion.After trying them a bit I come to the impression that Aniso 4 and a negative LOD bias are simply activated by default in the Omega driver. Anyway you do not have to tweak them with a 3rd party tool frm what I have seen. Textures that are farther away seem to look very good.Alex

Thanks Alex.If the driver activate such "tweak" as default there would be no wonder in having same good crispy and sharp image. Having that said, do you get similar performance hit? Well, I know there is no reference for comparison but say if the Omega driver is based on 29.42, how well Omega perform against 29.42+twek by utility ??brgrdsYuki

Hi Yuki,You will find some post say these Omegas are "great", I cant agree and I think that most folks that are familiar with how to use RvTuner, GTU or HardPage to set LOD and Aniso would also not agree.These Drivers simply use a very aggressive LOD and no anisotropic filtering so there is an awful lot of aliasing and swimming to the textures as well as the blurred low angle image mess which only goes away after reaching altitude, but to each his own I guess.As far as the 30.30s go, aniso is not fixed for GF4 cards, the performance is a tad slower than most of the 29.xx series but very close to 29.42 performance, stability again seems to be the focus of these drivers but remember, these are "leaked" drivers so we will have to wait for official 30.xx drivers from NV before we can make any fianl call.Take care,

There is no aniso just a very agresive LOD, hence the still blurred mess near the ground. LOD is best kept at or near 0.5 - 0.0 (stock driver default best image quality) so as to avoid texture aliasing which causes the "swimming" and "shimmering" texture effects, proplems that are present in these Omega drivers.I would not reccomend them for FS2k2.

Hi thereWell i dont like to tweak anything, either it works or it doesnt, so for me and a lot of others gamers the omega drivers are simply awesome, fs2002 has never looked this great before on any of my computers and the fps loss is almost zero at least on my pc.I cant wait to see fs200x on a console, just plug it in and play, well maybe im dreaming :)amd 1900xpasus ti46001gig of ddr ramwinxp

Well, sorry but after having played with them a bit I have to agree with Paul. The image is very crisp and nice but the texture shimmering has gotten worse.Alex