Hurray!, new Quadro WHQL Driver, finally...

[Aeka]

ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/Quadro_Certified/91.36

 

Not like any of you guys care...

Some may though, It's good news for me hehe.

 

 

I finally get to check out a new quadro driver, and a 9x one at that(finally, I've been waiting to check these out).

 

Hip hip, hurray!

 

Aww, I'm so happy lol.

/me is exicted sorta

[Aeka]

I just installed it, I was running a 24hr run of 3 instances of prime so...

 

 

So far initial impression seem like they have'nt screwed anything up, it seems though, so far.

GTASA is running like it was before, same texture probs as before .

(I'll have to instal 67.20 to find out for sure if these have been here the whole time, they stand out more in fog weather..., check the train tracks on the 1st island by north point to see what I'm talking about, the mounting walls flash with multible texture layers)

(I think it's north point anyways, by the board walk on the right side of the map, by the expressway thing)

 

 

Anyways speed wise.

Compared it to an older driver.

Seems slower slightly.

Way slower in some areas in ogl , dstill fast enough however to game, but still, probably a 1/5th frame drop.

 

I compared agaisnt driver 8.4.2.6 Quadro WHQL.

I did'nt do much comparing though, so I can't say for sure, but it is on avg slower by a small amount, and "possibly" slower in huge amounts in some areas(Will have to check again).

 

Maybe it's faster in newer type of stuff, like 3dmark03+ and such, I dn, and I can't test that with my old broken quadro4 900xgl, efficiantly anyways.

I have no clue n did'nt bother testing that.

 

I will try out farcry later though when I feal like it.

OGL specifically, and d3d.

OGL has some major probs in the later rev's of that game, as where the 1st release of it had no real probs.

It seems as if nv's driver does'nt trully support ogl 2.0+....., that's what I meant.

 

I can test performance though in that game, because I can still play it around 100fps on this old broken card running 200mhz mem :.

Not as pretty in d3d as a newer card(well more so in some ways, less so in ps and vs ways).

 

I'll probably give the old ut2004 demo a test too for the heck of it.

 

Laters.

 

Oh about the new cpl, I have no clue, I did'tn install it so I dn't know if I liked it or not lol.

I don't even like the old one....

[SeanDude05]

ive always wondered what the comparison is between geforce and quadro in gaming. Now Im well aware Quadro is designed for video and 3d creation/editing... but how does it compare?

[Aeka]

One direct comparison is how a geforce sorta cheaps out on textures.

In facry, in d3d mode.

If you look at the background, no matter what sort of texture lod or mip lod bais you have setup, you can't get the background to unblur.

 

With a quadro however, it's straight all the way, until you reach the drawing limit set by the game(where it turns 2d).

Actually it still blurs some stuff here and there, but that's the game.

You'll see that in the hills in the background, from far far away.

 

So instead of blur hell, you get crisp texture.

Also the loading screens in farcry are slightly diffrent, the loading bars them selves I mean, the borders are blured on a geforece, while the quadro shows it all.

 

 

Lighting is slightly diffrent.

A quadro4's t&l rivals and beats a geforce6 and probably above in many ways when it comes to that.

However, the quadr4 is just a gf4, so you only got ps1.3 with that.

On newer quadro's, I'm sure it's gotta be sheer bliss.

 

 

Some things are faster, general stuff is.

Effects are generally faster on the geforce due to what you "might" call gimmicks I guess.

The boost of speed is neglagible though compared to the speed gains of a quadro in some areas.

 

I mean, you may lose 3fps here or there on a quadro, but gain 20fps in other spots.

 

 

The cpl, quadro's still have ogl options like the older drivers.

And a few ones that geforces don't get access to(however most of them are useable on a geforce).

 

Oh, and the detial levels in the cpl, the lod's, they are locked on a quadro(lower then geforce then default(it means higher detail)).

Which is not a big deal, because both kinds of cards can do -15 of course, however that's probably the main reason people think they are slower for gaming, because quadro's are setup for a higher detail level as default and locked on that.

Not the highest detail level's though, far from it actually.

By default it'll blur your mip textures just like geforce, but starting at a farther distance, stuff like that.

Texture details themsevles I don't know to much about, I only know of a few possible values for that one, and -15 does'nt seem to make a diffrence but slow it down.

I think I used -1.3 or -1.1...

 

Whatever though on that.

 

Rendering is smoother.

Kinda hard to explain that one.

Say this is a geforce's frame rendering 1.3.5

Say this is a quadro's 12345

Not exactly like that, but it seems like it, it's noticable slightly, more like a feal sorta thing, but defently there(maybe it's just faster I dn).

 

 

Video captureing, nvidia based, i used to belive was betetr on the quadro's, now I don't really notice a diffrence between a 6600gt, and a quadro4 900xgl.

I used to notcied diffrences between a ti4600 and a q4 900xgl but thatwas along time ago.

At that time, quadro's did'nt have macrovision protection while the geforces did, it's not that way now though , they both have it.

 

Either that or I did'nt put my graph together correctly this last time I checked, which is possible.

 

 

Anyways it's more of a personal feal sorta thing.

If you are ok with ati cards in general, or nvidia geforces, then you probably would'nt care about a quadro, or even think of it, unless maye you saw one in action.

Even then you might not care.

 

Some poeple love them, and there seems to be only a few people I've speak out saying they use the for actual gaming.

I use them for gaming myself (really that's all I use them for, I don't really care about 3d work).

People that use them for gaming probably wou'dnt want to use anything else.

Unless they found another card of comparison, professional wise, and with nvidia's so called ease of use (which many have a hard time with as it is compare to ati).

Personally to me, it looks sick to me running on a geforce, nasty like.

 

I run my card at some exteme detail level's though, and most I guess call that crazy what I do, no kidding :.

The vdub author even said I was nuts running it that high...

I like it though.

 

 

 

 

I can grab you a shot or 2 to look at.

I hope..., hard to upload things recently for me, I can't find anythig decent to up to these days.

So hopefully I can figuer out something(size constraights because the other hosts are crapped out for now).

 

It won't give you an idea how a quadro is though.

I'm afraid I can't run farcry in d3d right now, which goes hand in hand with this newer driver I'm testing out too.

 

Something to do with how my os is hacked, I forgot about it.

Once ina while, certain installs of win2k3, of mine, don't allow me to run facry in d3d for some reason, while other times it's ok.

Full game or demo(I have the demo installe dright now I noticed so...).

When it's done loading a new game, it sits there at a blank screen, monitor shuts off and there's no screen.

Win2kpro works fine every time though :.

Like I said, totally forgot about that.

 

Anyways I will run the demo and get a screen from some spot to give you an idea of how I run things.

Also I'll see if I got ut2004 demo around too, that's a good one to show people how high my detail levels are.

 

If I could run farcry in d3d I could show you the diff between a quadro and a geforce :.

I can explain it though after I make my shots to give you guys an idea.

 

 

Anyways, one thing I notcied in this newer driver, the early 9x series.

Lighting has improve drasticly in some areas, noticing it in gtasa (grand theft auto san andreas).

Some areas are screweed up, between crosswalks in certain cities, there's a lit up strip on the road at the intersections where there shouldnt be.

Headlights are actually working now, lighting up stuff now, but, the stuff that's lit up, are all grey(no texture), like it's using a +15 bais.

 

Overall it's a keeper, maybe slight performance hit like I said before in my previous post.

Early driver, so I hope to see things improved more and stuff fixed.

Then some speed ups.

When that happens, it'll be one of those bad @ss drivers.

 

As for quadro driver's ver's geforce driver's.

they are allmost the same.

The quado drivers have that smooth feal, while real gefoce ones don't.

Otherwise there's is absolutly no diffrence other then some have a buig, and some don't (45.23 I think, quadro had buggy halo graphics on some level's while the geforce ver of that same driver did'nt).

Performance is, well, close enough to call them identical.

 

It's all in the defaults...

Cpl controllable or not.

 

BRB

[centy]

I modded my Geforce 3 Ti 200 64mb to a Quadro DCC way back when, just to see if it could be done really.

It can

The card still thinks it's a Quadro to this day, never had a reason to switch it back to Geforce.

 

The cheapest 'real' Quadro DCC 64mb I can find on ebay is still $95 buy now, amazing that they still cost so much.

[Aeka]

Quadro4 900xgl's cost quite a bit too, hold on a sec..

 

Found a 980xgl q4 for $420 lol, and a 900xgl for $150.

On pricegrabber.

 

A qfx 4000 (6800u equ) is $2200 right now there.

 

Priccewatch, I dn, the above is good enough for me to compare with for now.

 

The 6800u/gt is the last of the geforce where there's a publicly known hardware mod for too .

$408 for a 6800u of pricegrabber .

$400 for a good quadro these days it seems, maybe cheaper elsewhere, but these 6800u's are getting hard to find, I think.

The gt's too, agp wise(and the above was a pci-e).

 

PCI-e wise though they are'nt as hard to find.

Lemme check pricewatch.

Found a pci-e one oem on pricewatch for $170, not saying the shop selling it is worthey, I dn, but still.

Not a bad price, tiny bit pricey, but worth the money if you could get it.

Shame that it's only pci-e though(good for those with nf4's and stuff...).

 

 

Anyways I made some screens, not the greatest though.

Really wierd too, ever single shot in bmp form blurred them a bit, I've never seen that before :.

Ohwell, then I had to make them into jpg's which is even worse.

However they are small enough to upload to imgshack though.

 

So I can do that, I got 12 ones that turned out(the others paint screwed up by adding previous shots to the top of my caps for some reason).

 

I'll upload them in a sec, then give the links in my next post here .

[Aeka]

I hope I do this right without having the forum pick them up as pics, then having it full screen them right out in the open...

 

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/1.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/2.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/3.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/4.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/5.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/6.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/7.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/8.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/9.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/10.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/11.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/20.JPG

 

I'd better check them too...

 

Anyways when I pasted them into paint they got darker and blurryer, on top of that I converted them into jpg's so I could up them (dialup and host issues).

 

Please disregarde the frame rates in ut and farcry.

Ut, seemed slower then usual for some reason, also it wou'dnt allow me to use 1024x768 with my monitor driver(or maybe it's my supported video modes)(I'll have to check that out later).

 

Farcry, I accidently put it on 640x480 earlyer.

Long story sorta.

Very slow for some reason, I must of had some stuff in it jacked way way up.

Wierd.

I did'nt check that, and I did'nt care.

 

Farcry was the demo as was ut2004.

 

Also my card is broken so it's running 200mhz mem, and 300mhz core.

Not an excuse though because I can normally play that farcry demo at 800x600 at full speed regardless.

With decent details.

 

With ut, normally 1024x768 with everything jacked by hand.

That shot I made I only used the in game setup to jack it up.

And it's the demo...

 

 

I tried to get off some good shots but I think I failed miserablly.

But hey, I got a few of them, maybe you can make it out compared to the norm.

Not my card is about the same as a gf4ti so understand it's possible ps and vs details....

 

Blah blah lol.

Anyways I was trying to show you the texture details really(failed pretty good on that one too).

Tried to get some of that lighting in gtasa but kinda failed in that.

 

gtasa's max res wsas the game's, my monitor driver or supported display modes for now, again with that, I'll figuer it out on my own time someday.

I normally play most stuff at 640x480 with this card anyways, like I said, it's half dead.

 

 

The ideas are.

Look at the side of the mountin areas of farcry, in d3d mode, with a geforce looking at it like that, or closer or farther away I dn lol, it'll blur like a mofo.

On a quadro it don't.

Also note where it does blur, because of the game it's self, it's allways did that, the full game does that too(big blur spots on the ground and stuff).

 

What else was I going to say...

 

Oh, ok a few more things.

1st of all, you can't really see it in the pics that wwell, but when you use a -15 mip bais.

It makes things look pixalated.

I like that, not because it's all dotty or whatever, but because it's not blurred/screwed.

The higher the res you use, the better it looks, and using AA helps alot too.

Using AF makes it look very very bad, horrible, AF is nasty I think(nasty blur, even 16x AF is).

I use trilinear filtering to help fix this.

 

 

Umm, looks like I got some white bs on the sides on one of the img's is screwed up, but it's ok anyways I guess.

That and I did a really horrible job of showing poeple what you can do with a nvidia card...

 

 

To get an idea, if you got ut2k3 or 2k4, even the demo's, you can adjust the mip and tecture bais in the ini file.

Make it -15 or whatever and you'll see it.

Make sure to turn off AF though.

You can do the same with ati cards too, in that game.

And only in games that allow you to adjust it, ati does'nt have a working bais adjustment in the driver at all(one of them partially works, the texture lod I believe, but not the mip).

 

Most people probably wou'dnt like -15 anyways.

But there's allways -1.1 or -1.3 I forgot which, looks ok I think.

 

 

Anyways with quadro's, you get the extras you dn't get with geforces.

Just a higher quality card manily, no shortcuts.

You can still use most shortcuts yeah, just like you can with a geforce, err, cheats you might call them.

The rendering is smoother, certain thigns are way faster(yes in gaming too), and some thigns are slightly slower.

The gains outwiegh the losses though.

But the cost of a professional card is steep.

 

Software mods don't work right.

There is a diffrence between a soft mod and a hardware mod.

If you've tried both you may beabel to tell, you might not.

There is the problem of the software mods not worknig in general though(most of the time they don't), and like I said, it's not the same.

The drivers can straight up detect the diffrence between a strapped id and a hardwired id so...

 

Even with a card that is compatible and such, run a heavy ogl app and pow, within either afew secs to an hour or so, inf loop to the card.

Major slowdown it lockup(depending on how much your pc can handle).

This heats up, at least my agp regs, alot!

After which I did a hardware mod, notcied some diff's in rendering here and there, and higher quality then even the soft mod, also, no inf loops.

 

45.xx was the last driver I had without inf loops, all other drivers above that(even if they were'nt supported, there's an way to doit with a supported card), worked, but got you inf loops in doom3 after a long period of time.

Or, my fav test for fakes, visualboy advanced(a gba emu), in ogl mode.

inf loops within secs to within a half hour at most with fakes.

 

 

Anyways lol...

To end the long post of mine.

There's nothign wrong with trying a quadro driver, ie, a tiny mod to add one device id(for your peticuler geforce), and trying it out.

I would actually reccomend it....

Even with my 6600gt, I prefered the quadro drivers :.

 

Quality over speed, as long as you don't lose all that speed , I think anyways.

I gotta get to bed though, been a long day and it's gonna be another long day tomarrow, which kinda sucks....

Still have to help out that one dude with his 7900gt still...

[Aeka]

I hope I do this right without having the forum pick them up as pics, then having it full screen them right out in the open...

 

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/1.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/2.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/3.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/4.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/5.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/6.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/7.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/8.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/9.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/10.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/11.JPG

http://www.voguehost.com/ims/u/ajdhsw/1/20.JPG

 

I'd better check them too...

 

Anyways when I pasted them into paint they got darker and blurryer, on top of that I converted them into jpg's so I could up them (dialup and host issues).

 

Please disregarde the frame rates in ut and farcry.

Ut, seemed slower then usual for some reason, also it wou'dnt allow me to use 1024x768 with my monitor driver(or maybe it's my supported video modes)(I'll have to check that out later).

 

Farcry, I accidently put it on 640x480 earlyer.

Long story sorta.

Very slow for some reason, I must of had some stuff in it jacked way way up.

Wierd.

I did'nt check that, and I did'nt care.

 

Farcry was the demo as was ut2004.

 

Also my card is broken so it's running 200mhz mem, and 300mhz core.

Not an excuse though because I can normally play that farcry demo at 800x600 at full speed regardless.

With decent details.

 

With ut, normally 1024x768 with everything jacked by hand.

That shot I made I only used the in game setup to jack it up.

And it's the demo...

 

 

I tried to get off some good shots but I think I failed miserablly.

But hey, I got a few of them, maybe you can make it out compared to the norm.

Not my card is about the same as a gf4ti so understand it's possible ps and vs details....

 

Blah blah lol.

Anyways I was trying to show you the texture details really(failed pretty good on that one too).

Tried to get some of that lighting in gtasa but kinda failed in that.

 

gtasa's max res wsas the game's, my monitor driver or supported display modes for now, again with that, I'll figuer it out on my own time someday.

I normally play most stuff at 640x480 with this card anyways, like I said, it's half dead.

 

 

The ideas are.

Look at the side of the mountin areas of farcry, in d3d mode, with a geforce looking at it like that, or closer or farther away I dn lol, it'll blur like a mofo.

On a quadro it don't.

Also note where it does blur, because of the game it's self, it's allways did that, the full game does that too(big blur spots on the ground and stuff).

 

What else was I going to say...

 

Oh, ok a few more things.

1st of all, you can't really see it in the pics that wwell, but when you use a -15 mip bais.

It makes things look pixalated.

I like that, not because it's all dotty or whatever, but because it's not blurred/screwed.

The higher the res you use, the better it looks, and using AA helps alot too.

Using AF makes it look very very bad, horrible, AF is nasty I think(nasty blur, even 16x AF is).

I use trilinear filtering to help fix this.

 

 

Umm, looks like I got some white bs on the sides on one of the img's is screwed up, but it's ok anyways I guess.

That and I did a really horrible job of showing poeple what you can do with a nvidia card...

 

 

To get an idea, if you got ut2k3 or 2k4, even the demo's, you can adjust the mip and tecture bais in the ini file.

Make it -15 or whatever and you'll see it.

Make sure to turn off AF though.

You can do the same with ati cards too, in that game.

And only in games that allow you to adjust it, ati does'nt have a working bais adjustment in the driver at all(one of them partially works, the texture lod I believe, but not the mip).

 

Most people probably wou'dnt like -15 anyways.

But there's allways -1.1 or -1.3 I forgot which, looks ok I think.

 

 

Anyways with quadro's, you get the extras you dn't get with geforces.

Just a higher quality card manily, no shortcuts.

You can still use most shortcuts yeah, just like you can with a geforce, err, cheats you might call them.

The rendering is smoother, certain thigns are way faster(yes in gaming too), and some thigns are slightly slower.

The gains outwiegh the losses though.

But the cost of a professional card is steep.

 

Software mods don't work right.

There is a diffrence between a soft mod and a hardware mod.

If you've tried both you may beabel to tell, you might not.

There is the problem of the software mods not worknig in general though(most of the time they don't), and like I said, it's not the same.

The drivers can straight up detect the diffrence between a strapped id and a hardwired id so...

 

Even with a card that is compatible and such, run a heavy ogl app and pow, within either afew secs to an hour or so, inf loop to the card.

Major slowdown it lockup(depending on how much your pc can handle).

This heats up, at least my agp regs, alot!

After which I did a hardware mod, notcied some diff's in rendering here and there, and higher quality then even the soft mod, also, no inf loops.

 

45.xx was the last driver I had without inf loops, all other drivers above that(even if they were'nt supported, there's an way to doit with a supported card), worked, but got you inf loops in doom3 after a long period of time.

Or, my fav test for fakes, visualboy advanced(a gba emu), in ogl mode.

inf loops within secs to within a half hour at most with fakes.

 

 

Anyways lol...

To end the long post of mine.

There's nothign wrong with trying a quadro driver, ie, a tiny mod to add one device id(for your peticuler geforce), and trying it out.

I would actually reccomend it....

Even with my 6600gt, I prefered the quadro drivers :.

 

Quality over speed, as long as you don't lose all that speed , I think anyways.

I gotta get to bed though, been a long day and it's gonna be another long day tomarrow, which kinda sucks....

Still have to help out that one dude with his 7900gt still...

 

Edit:

The links all work...

Pic 20 was my fav, shame how blurry it got though.

Notice that it still has some detail though, as where normally I'd bet it'd be blurred out allready, notice the ground textures, fly that up in the real game and see how it blurs in your rig, it does'nt blur at all in mine(excpet the fact I don't have my draw distance jacked up right now, but that's only buildings)

[Aeka]

I just wanted to dig out this thread before I leave tomarrow for about a week.

 

Mainly I wanted to say, after initial testing I found something.

This drivers increase my pi times by 1-2 secs, which is not good.

So..., the 9x drivers suck I think, for now.

They are pulling to much off the cpu right now.

 

It'll probably be a while before they get back into shape, way later in the 9x ver's or maybe 10x, who knows.

I figuer I'd just let you guys know, check your pi times when you update to a whole new driver series...

 

Also as a side note lol, I've redid my bais settings in my own driver and found the actual limits for them, at least one of them anyways.

Sorta interesting...

I improved the quality a tiny bit from before so that all cool.

 

 

Some of you may understand this so I'll post it for your info:

 

 

;Texture LOD Bais

;HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,00,00,00,00 ;0? [CPL-Best Image Quality]

;HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,02,00,00,00 ;0.2? [CPL-High Image Quality]

;HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,04,00,00,00 ;0.4? [CPL-Blend]

;HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,08,00,00,00 ;0.8? [CPL-High Performance]

;HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,0a,00,00,00 ;1? [CPL-Best Performance]

;HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,7f,00,00,00 ;+12.7? (+Max)

HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,80,ff,ff,ff ;-12.7? (-Max)

;HKR,,D3D_88481200, %REG_BINARY%,f7,ff,ff,ff ;-0.9?

 

 

How I tested:

;Mip Mapping

HKR,,D3D_36759435, %REG_BINARY%,01,91,82,24 ;Enabled (Default)

;HKR,,D3D_36759435, %REG_BINARY%,23,17,39,48 ;Disabled

 

 

This I need to figuer out more:

;I don't know how to really test this one at the moment

;MipMap LOD Bais

;[image_settings]

;HKR,,D3D_QualityEnhancements, %REG_BINARY%,00,00,00,00 ;0? [CPL-Quality]

;HKR,,D3D_QualityEnhancements, %REG_BINARY%,0a,00,00,00 ;1.3? [CPL-Performance]

;HKR,,D3D_QualityEnhancements, %REG_BINARY%,14,00,00,00 ;2.5? [CPL-High Performance]

HKR,,D3D_QualityEnhancements, %REG_BINARY%,f6,ff,ff,ff ;-1.3?

;HKR,,D3D_QualityEnhancements, %REG_BINARY%,ff,ff,ff,ff ;-0.1?

 

 

That concludes my thread and such ont he early 9x drivers, I don't like them enough to mess around with them more.

I won't be updating to another one either unless it's at least ver 91.xx probably or whatever.

Then one of the very 1st things I'll be doing is checking my pi times compared to 84.26.