Leaked Nvidia drivers boost Pentium 4 performance

What about Athlon?

Reports indicate that the latest leaked Nvidia driver release (version 12.00) significantly improves performance on Pentium 4 machines by a great deal.

The new drivers boost performance by up to 90 per cent in business applications, according to one sensational report on German Web site All-About-PC. Gaming performance is also said to be affected, with an impressive increase of 200 3D Marks under the 2001 edition of the popular benchmark application.

Reports also indicate that Windows XP performance (of all things) is improved as well. The drivers can be downloaded from all the usual outfits, including The-Ctrl-Alt-Del.com.

We tried the 12.00 drivers with a GeForce 3 on an Athlon machine, but 3D Mark 2001 failed to complete on several occasions, whereas with the 11.01 driver set - a release candidate, according to Nvidia - completed successfully. 12.00 performance was certainly marginally better under Windows 2000, but on Windows Millennium it was more or less unchanged.

You'll recall an interesting announcement when the GeForce 3 was still several months off (no, not last week) that Nvidia intended to build Athlon and Pentium 4 optimisations into the new Detonator driver set. Perhaps the performance boosts in version 12.00 - at least for the Intel CPU - are evidence of this.

On a related note, The-Ctrl-Alt-Del.com also has 12.10 drivers for Windows 2000. As yet we haven't had the opportunity to test these, but if one of you has, particularly on a Pentium 4 get-up, we'd love some feedback on them. ®

Related Link

The-Ctrl-Alt-Del.com's download page

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