nVidia is the biggest manufacturer of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), basically the core of external graphics cards. These mean machines are the guys who power your way through amazing games with advanced 3D models, detailed texture mapping, blah and some more blah.
The thing is that, even though they make amazing GPUs, their drivers are not that much up to the mark. It seems that they are not efficient when it comes to relaying 3D rendering from applications to the cards. This takes up the DPCs on the PC, causing the CPU to be bottlecked and…well…slower games. This is a major drawback, which simply dilutes the fun of having a nice graphics card.
Also, there’s a small niche of PC maniacs, who love to tweak their PCs to give maximum performance. When it comes to boot times, the latest nVidia display drivers are not good. They make that bar scroll over and over again.
Tell you what, downgrade.
Yup, you heard/read me right. Downgrade to a lower version, assuming your card is supported, coz’ nVidia isn’t adding anything much for other cards. I’ve got a AMD Athlon64 3200+, 1 GB DDRI RAM, a nVidia 6600GT and a Seagate 160GB Barracuda, and with Forceware 77.77, the PC boots within *five* scrolls of the Windows booting bar. Otherwise, it used to take ages.
October 7, 2007 at 8:25 pm
As per what I read on the internet, Nvidia drivers WERE actually better than ATi drivers… I would say were coz ATi has recently open sourced its drivers, and the new drivers coming out from the OSS guys are far far more efficient.
Anyway, Nvidia drivers support technologies that are not needed in gaming, but are needed for other applications like 3D scientific visualizations, and other professional stuff. If you wanted to do the same with an ATi card, you would have to use the reverse engineered FGLRX drivers… or something similar. Nvidia provided greater functionality with its cards. Currently ATi Rulez! With fully OSSed drivers working to juice out the max out of the chip, and high performance to price ratio, along with Ruby, I want a Radeon 2600 HD now..!!