P4 up to 114% faster with NVRef 12.10

[Raystonn]

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q2/010511/nvidia-08.html

Wow, I knew the Detonator 12.10 drivers sped up Pentium 4 systems, but I had not realized the performance gain was that much. Performance improved 114% in one SPECviewperf test. Overall the Pentium 4 now beats the Athlon squarely in this benchmark. I recommend all Pentium 4 + nVidia card owners grab these drivers asap.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

 

[Grizely1]

it beats the Athlon now (well it's about f***ing time), but still not by much.

---------
I am the first and only one with a 16MB GeForce2 GTS graphics card!

 

[Crashman]

It's gpoing to be interesting at my next major upgrade to see who's on top, with all this new technology flying around! Chipsets will get better for AMD, software will get better, with a model revison, in the P4. My current system is so powerfull that I might not go with my anual major upgrade in the fall, but instead wait until next spring!

Cast not thine pearls before the swine

 

[Ncogneto]

Yup them Nvidia guys really know there stuff when it comes to drivers. Be really interesting to see what they can do with a chipset for AMD

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[jlbigguy]

Overall, the drivers have a significant positive impact on Athlon based machines as well. The review is in plain sight for all to read.

<font color=blue>This is a Forum, not a playground. Treat it with Respect.</font color=blue>

 

[Raystonn]

Switching an Athlon system to the new drivers gave an improvement for 5 benchmark tests and decreased performance on 8 benchmark tests. Overall, you get worse performance with the new drivers on an Athlon system.

Switching a Pentium 4 system to the new drivers gave an improvement for 10 benchmark tests and decreased performance on 3 benchmark tests. Overall, this is a definate improvement.

I cannot see where you came up with your conclusion that the new "drivers have significant positive impact on Athlon based machines". Quite the reverse seems to be the truth.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

 

[Guest]

Well it looks like we'll have to see, perhaps Nvidia's chipset for athlon will be horrible, maybe it will be great, theres no way we can know. Until then, quiet.

 

[mjdunn]

I agree the new drivers did not improve very good on athlon based system...I've removed them and went back to my old drivers.

P3800 geforce did not do well at all with those drivers. Made windows unusable....big black boxes around the mousepointer.

Nice to see the P4 Doing much better with some new stuff.

96.3 % of Statistics are made up.

 

[Raystonn]

"Well it looks like we'll have to see, perhaps Nvidia's chipset for athlon will be horrible, maybe it will be great, theres no way we can know. Until then, quiet."

Who is discussing an nVidia chipset? I believe you have the wrong thread.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

 

[Guest]

Great. Were seeing more and more applications and hardware optimized to take advantage of P4 architecture. But most people arent thrilled about it because hardly anyone owns a P4 or even wants one right now.


(A)bort, (R)etry, (G)et a beer?

 

[Raystonn]

Well if they don't care about the optimizations, why do they read threads with P4 in the subject? Perhaps they all have hopes of finding some flaw in the post that they can use to start a flame war? I hate to disappoint, but I do not write those kinds of posts.

At any rate, for those of you who do own Pentium 4 CPUs, your day is coming. This forum is a bit like a pendulum, with Intel on one side and AMD on the other. Everyone curses and wars when the technology pendulum reaches the edge and stops. Pretty soon it starts swinging in the other direction and the other company produces the best product. After a while most in the forum have one of these newer CPUs, and then the same thing repeats itself once the pendulum reaches the edge of the other side. Believe it or not there will come a time when once again Intel has the popular CPU with the enthusiast crowd. Until then just smile and nod, it drives everyone crazy.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =

 

[Guest]

word

 

[Guest]

Personally, I’m disappointed at the way both processor platforms are right now. Intel has really disappointed me lately. The P4 has nothing great to offer, AMD CPU’s are fast and furious but the motherboards have serious compatibility problems and are unstable.
As a tech-savvy consumer who expects cutting edge performance, a half-way decent upgrade path, rock-solid stability and 99% hardware/software compatibility I feel left out in the cold. Neither platform’s can meet my expectations right now. But things aren’t so bad I still have my 700@933mhz on an i815E motherboard, 512mb of RAM and a Geforce 2 Ultra. It’ll hold me over for awhile but I’m hopeful things will look better for the Intel platform when Northwood arrives.



(A)bort, (R)etry, (G)et a beer?

 

[Toejam31]

I tried them with my GeForce3 and the P4 after I saw the article ... maybe the numbers look better in a few benchmarks, but when I ran some tests, such as with 3DMark 2000, the results were worse than with the 7.58's. And when in 1024x768x32, the whole screen shifted over to the right about an inch and a half. On my system, nothing is centered on the screen unless the monitor refresh rate is at least 85Hz ... something the 12.10's cannot support. Or so it appears.

In fact, I'm having trouble finding a Win2k nVidia driver for the GeForce3 that supports anything higher than 75Hz.

Oh, yeah, just in case somebody thinks about it ... yep, I've got the right monitor driver installed.

Now ... I've heard a rumor that one of the nVidia .inf files can be edited to change this ... any truth to it? And if so, exactly how is it done?

Toejam31

<font color=purple>If there was a reason for everything, having faith would be redundant.</font color=purple>

 

[HolyGrenade]

The Improvement in for Athlon in the OpenGL part of the Drivers. Keep in mind it isn't completed yet to be released as final. Maybe they have some AMD routines still to be Added.


<font color=red>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!"</font color=red>

 

[tlaughrey]

Ncogneto mentioned the nVidia chipset up above.

 

[HolyGrenade]

I think it will be pretty ok, with one of the best memory architectures out there. The only thing is that both chipsets will have integrated graphics.



<font color=red>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!"</font color=red>

 

[rcf84]

Well i have a radeon 32mb ddr. Guess what i dont use NVRef drivers. I like care about them. This is a why for you people just to flame each other. Heck im in the middle cuz im the nice intel guy. I refuse to put flame posts.

The only nice Intel guy.

 

[HolyGrenade]

It would make sense not using the nvidia drivers on your ATI.

flame? Where?


<font color=red>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!"</font color=red>

 

[AeroSnoop]

Great that you guys are getting a little boost here but is that the only page you looked at? The results on the rest of the pages aren't near as exciting. So wheres this 90% boost again? You guys are aware that this may improve video performance a little but not processing power right? These are video drivers after all...

 

[Ncogneto]

Aren't we jumping the gun with this just a bit? These are beta drivers and as others have reported the improvements come with issues. You should wait until some Whql drivers are released by Nvidia to make such a claim. As for now all users that choose to use them do so at there own risk. I have seen beta drivers before that have caused people to need to reformat to get things back to normal. As of this moment, I admit it does look promising, but it very well could be that after the "issues" have been cleared up the performance increases will not be nearly as substantial. Your claim of "114%" certainly does grab attention. However, improvements must be measured across the board, not just on one synthetic app.

And once agian remember that we are comparing a P4 clocked at 1.7 gig compared to a Athlon clocked at 1.33 gig. Hardly a fair comparison. The p4 costing at current prices $356.00 to a athlon costing $197.00. Even your Rdram to cas2 DDr ram argument is no longer relevant as Cas 2 DDR is cheaper than Rdram as well. How will these new drivers fair across platforms when comparing the two processors at a clock for clock or dollar for dollar comparison?

we could compare a p4 @1.4 gig to a athlon at 1.33

Or we could compare a p3@1gig ($199.00) to an athlon at 1.33 gig ($197.00). Now this would truley be a sight to behold now wouldn't it? How many Intel users would scream bloody murder that this was not a fair comparison when in fact it was much more so when looking at total cost?

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Ncogneto]

<font color=red>I think it will be pretty ok, with one of the best memory architectures out there. The only thing is that both chipsets will have integrated graphics.</font color=red>

True, however, just like the I815 ( good board by the way ) it will also allow the user to add a agp card and disable the onboard graphics. In addition the onboard graphics will definatly be much better than the onboard graphics offered in the I815 ( not that many of us care). What this will allow is a decent, cost effective integrated solution allowing AMD more penetration into the business sector ( ie secretary, word processing et all), while at the same time makeing it very attractive to gamers and the like as well by offering the option to upgrade the graphics. In retrospect it looks to be Amd's version of the I815 to some extent.


A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[HolyGrenade]

The Graphics Chip will be the nv17. The specs arent out yet, but it will be GeForce 2 Class with the memory architecture of the GeForce 3. Perhaps it eill have some other features aswell.


<font color=red>"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and dispair!"</font color=red>

 

[Phelk]

~ This forum is a bit like a pendulum, with Intel on one side and AMD on the other. Pretty soon it starts swinging in the other direction and the other company produces the best product. ~

This is so true, it is actually very good that the two companies are out of synch. Currently AMD is generally the best bang for the buck, but Intel will go to 0.13u first and the software will be better tuned by then and P4 (Northwood) will rock AMD's world fo a while. Then AMD's Thoroughbred will turn up and the pendulum will swing again all to the consumers advantage.

The only thing I hate is that currently we have Intel nuts (like Fugger, AMDMeltdown and crew) trying to justify the P4 when it is obviously not 'ripe' yet. On the other hand as soon as the P4 does reach it's potential we will get AMD nuts (yet to be named) trying to claim that an aging Athlon core is better just because it's not Intel.

Let us congratulate nVidia for juicing up the P4 and urge them to do the same for the Palomino.

<font color=blue> The Revolution starts here... as soon as I finish my coffee </font color=blue>

 

[Raystonn]

"You should wait until some Whql drivers are released by Nvidia to make such a claim."

First off it's not a claim but a measurement made by Tom. Second, everyone in this forum loves tweaking their system. I'd call overclocking a processor about on par with installing beta drivers as far as stability is concerned. I did say the 114% was in one test. I'm sorry I couldn't fit everything into the subject, but there's a limit to the length of the subject lines.

"And once agian remember that we are comparing a P4 clocked at 1.7 gig compared to a Athlon clocked at 1.33 gig. Hardly a fair comparison."

Completely fair in my opinion. These are the best offerings from each company. Not only that, but clock speed is not indicative of performance. Average instructions per second (MIPS? BIPS?) is a true measurement of performance. This is obtained by multiplying clockspeed by average instructions per clock (IPC). One cannot say comparing a 1.7GHz CPU with a different type of 1.33GHz CPU is unfair merely by looking at the clockspeed alone. Additionally, we all know to look at the price differences. The fastest Pentium 4 currently performs better than the fastest Athlon, but you always pay a premium for having the fastest. (In this case it's a $159 premium for the CPU. RDRAM and CAS2 PC2100 are about equal in price. The best Asus motherboards for P4 and Athlon are about equal in price.)

At any rate, this thread wasn't really about P4 vs. Athlon, but about how to get your Pentium 4 system to perform better by adding some new drivers.

-Raystonn

= The views stated herein are my personal views, and not necessarily the views of my employer. =