Drivers 2878 Published by

VR-Zone has tested out the Forceware 56.55 drivers which is WHQL Certified but not officially released yet.



It has some new features that are worth noting :

1. Support GeForce FX 5500, GeForce FX 5700LE and GeForce FX 5700VE
2. Application profiles that allow you to select profiles for different games and also customize your own preferred settings
3. Under Performance & Quality settings, you can force mipmaps to either None/Bilinear/Trilinear and set Hardware acceleration for single or multi-display modes
4. Under Advanced Direct3D settings, there are 3 new options; NULL fixed function, NULL PS 1.x and NULL 2.x option to improve performance in pixel shading demanding applications.
5. If you have enabled Coolbits, you will have the frequency adjustments page to overclock. Before you start overclocking, you need to agree to the overclocking license. The page offers "No overclocking" and "Manual overclocking" but some users will have the additional "Auto Overclocking" that allows the software to detect the best overclocked speed for you just like the ATi "OverDrive" function. However, it is most recommended to tweak the clock frequencies manually to obtain the optimum performance.

We find that Detonator 53.03 is still faring better in most of the benchmarks like 3DMark2001SE, UT2003, UT2004, SplinterCell and Quake III Arena but there are some nice improvements in 3DMark2003's Pixel Shader 2.0 test, Aquamark 3 and Serious Sam SE.
Read more