ForceWare 52.16: NVIDIA's retaliation
Final Words
The release of new ForceWare 52.16 driver has essentially changed the alignment of forces both in the high-end boards and in the mid- and low-end niches of the market. At that, the ASUS V9950 (NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900) graphic board reviewed today is the most indicative.
Synthetic benchmarks that make active use of pixel and vertex shader processing techniques unanimously report of a substantial rise in operation speed for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 (as well as all the boards of the GeForce FX family) at handling shaders. The rise is especially noticeable in processing shaders of version 2.0, which has always been a bottleneck for boards built on NVIDIA GeForce FX chips. Nevertheless, at synthetic benchmarks GeForce FX 5900 boards even with ForceWare 52.16 installed can't compete on par with ATI Radeon 9800. Note that such an alignment of forces in synthetics is caused primarily due to that the synthetic benchmarks used by us are built on the Microsoft HLSL (High Level Shader Language), while ATI boards, as we mentioned it in the theoretical part of our review, handle them much more efficiently than NVIDIA boards do for which the ideal option is the customized approach in writing shader programs for the architecture of GeForce FX boards. Boards built on the GeForce FX chips handle the standard DirectX 9.0 code much worse than ATI Radeon boards do, and the new NVIDIA drives doesn't change the situation radically, but merely reduces the gap slightly.
In real-life applications, as our tests showed, the situation for NVIDIA is much more favorable in view of the released ForceWare 52.16 driver. Sometimes, it's just the installation of a new driver allowed the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 board to take the crown and leave ATI Radeon 9800 somewhere in the middle between the results for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 (with Detonator 45.23 and ForceWare 52.16). Due to known reasons, shader applications here are the most indicative. But we would like to note that it's the wide popularity of benchmarks and games used as benchmarks in our research that played one of the leading parts.  What matters here is NVIDIA's program of cooperation with game developers (dubbed "The Way it's Meant to be Played") which is aimed at intense work with game developers to make the gaming engines more amenable to optimize for NVIDIA cards architecture. It that good or not? There is no one-one answer and can't be at all. The end user/gamer who is not into the details absolutely doesn't care how the maximum performance is attained by this or the other video cards manufacturer. By and large, it doesn't matter whether it will be achieved through tricky optimizations, or if the performance is originally high in the very architecture of the GPU. What really matters is the image quality. But here is another problem coming up: no matter how energetic NVIDIA is working with game developers, the company is unable to grasp ALL the developers who in turn would have to resort to writing the HLSV code which, as the practice of writing real gaming applications has shown a number of times, executes faster with ATI boards. That is why, in our view, NVIDIA chose a bit wrong policy in this case. There are many examples of that. Take, for instance, Half-Life 2 at which NVIDIA boards demonstrate appallingly low performance and rank on par with ATI's middle-end solutions Needless to say, Half-Life 2 is, without overstatement, a framework of future DirectX 9.0 games, and NVIDIA worked in quite close touch with Valve to optimize the game for the GeForce FX architecture. Of course, we can't claim to what extent the leaked beta version is optimized for NVIDIA boards or whether it is optimized at all, but it is a fact that GeForce FX 5900 is an ignominious failure at all the tests performed on the base of beta Half-Life 2 and it lags far well behind the ATI's contender. It is also a fact that game optimization for NVIDIA video cards is in practice a very troublesome job, which once again confirms the formerly made conclusions that NVIDIA can't artificially tune the performance of its cards to the "ATI's level".
With the release of new games that make increasingly intense use of version 2.0 pixel and vertex shader processing techniques, NVIDIA boards based on GeForce FX chips will look the more unconvincingly as compared to ATI boards (the examples are numerous). In our view, the most sound decision for NVIDIA would be the release of a new chip with the architecture pre-optimized for Microsoft HLSV (the issue of floating-point precision still remains open). To date, we can say for sure that all the owners of NVIDIA GeForce FX vide cards must install the new NVIDIA ForceWare 52.16 driver (the analysis of new versions of the driver, including unofficial ones - read in our further reviews), since the driver does optimize just the compiler itself and does not make any optimizations for a particular application, which is confirmed not only by gaming applications but by the synthetic benchmarks as well.
Read more on this topic:
 VGA Roundup Q3`2003
FX 5900 versus Radeon 9800Pro
FX 5600Ultra versus Radeon 9600Pro
FX 5200 versus Radeon 9200
Benchmarking methods:
"AquaMark 3" Benchmarking Package
"Unreal Tournament 2003" as a benchmark
"DooM 3" as a benchmark
3DMark 2003: see the future
3DMark 2001 Pro Benchmarking package
"Max Payne" as a benchmark
"Serious Sam" as a benchmark
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