Introduction

While it has been nearly two months since our last ForceWare driver report, NVIDIA’s driver team has certainly been busy. Last week NVIDIA’s PCI Express-based GeForce PCX family was introduced, which includes the GeForce PCX 5950, GeForce PCX 5750, GeForce PCX 5300, and GeForce PCX 4300. But these cards weren’t the only news item of the week for NVIDIA. The company also quietly unleashed its ForceWare 56 driver.

Before you hit up the driver download page on NVIDIA’s website however, you should know that NVIDIA isn’t providing this driver directly to the public just yet. Instead, ForceWare 56.56 is only available from NVIDIA’s board partners, or at least that’s what we’ve been told. We looked on the websites for board partners ASUS, BFG, eVGA, MSI, PNY, and XFX but couldn’t find them. Therefore, think of this driver as a preview of things to come from NVIDIA rather than an official driver release.

We’ve been told that this driver wasn’t released on NVIDIA’s website in order to resolve performance issues with Epic’s UT 2004 demo (This is the first time that we can recall a driver was held back due to performance in a demo that’s based on an unreleased game), and haven’t been given a firm ETA for a follow-up driver release, other than before the final game (UT 2004) is released to the public. This suggests that NVIDIA should have a final driver ready in the next three or four weeks, but we wanted to go ahead and take a look at this driver anyway, as it boasts many new features.

Access the control panel straight from your desktop

Woah, new menu interface

New look

The first aspect you will notice is the new user interface. NVIDIA has freshened things up a bit and for the first time in a graphics driver, you can navigate straight to the driver’s control panel directly from your desktop! Simply right click on the desktop and select “NVDisplay”. From there you’ll see the properties for your graphics adapter, where you can manipulate settings for your primary and secondary displays. As a result, you no longer have to open Windows display properties, select settings, then the advanced tab to get to the control panel.

Adjusting anisotropic filtering

6xS AA setting

Advanced settings disabled

Once you’re there, you’ll notice a few changes. The most obvious to gamers is that OpenGL and Direct3D settings have been merged together. Under the Performance and Quality menu, you now must adjust settings for anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, image settings, etc. individually, rather than doing it all in one swoop. This means making settings changes can take a little bit longer, which may come as a disappointment to many of you. If you click under the advanced settings option, you can also adjust additional settings, including texture filtering (unfortunately, UT 2003 still uses pseudo-trilinear filtering with this driver, even when trilinear is forced in the control panel).

Game profiles

In this same area, you will also find 20 game profiles; in this area you can predefine settings for your favorite games. A few of them even have separate game profiles for single-player use versus multiplayer. This is perfect for those of you who play a mix of sinple-player and multi, when playing in single player mode frame rate often takes a backseat to image quality whereas in multiplayer (especially competitive multiplayer), maintaining a high frame rate is crucial.

Game profiles!

Adjusting options for Halo

When the game is launched, the driver automatically detects the .exe and executes the settings you define.

Temperature control

New feature - auto overclocking, works just like OVERDRIVE!

And here is manual overclocking

If a game you play isn’t listed, adding new ones is quite easy. For instance, NVIDIA doesn’t include a game profile for Quake 3, so we made one in a few clicks. We decided to setup Quake 3 to run with 8xAA and 8xAF, the driver automatically knew to look for quake3.exe and when we clicked the Q3 icon, the driver executed our predefined settings perfectly!