Nvidia Detonator 40.71

[MRoadster]

I was wondering if anyone has had any luck running the latest beta Detonators released by Nvidia.

I've tried them out on my Ti4400 board on a 1.4 T-Bird Athlon 512DDR XP Pro setup. So far I've had no luck getting CMBB to run. Other programs such as Medieval Total War now run much better.

[MRoadster]

Hmmm....

Got it to work with anti-aliasing turned off. Guess I'll fiddle more with these new drivers.

[Doom Yeti]

P4-1.7Ghz

Ti4400

512MB RAM

The new drivers work just fine for me with 4x AA turned on. As a matter of fact it looks better now than it did this morning.

[MRoadster]

I've found that with AA turned off, I have no problems. 2XAA or 4XS = problems. I'll get garbled screens or missing text. I'll try 4XAA next.

These drivers appear to be much more stable than the initial beta release, but some of the graphical problems in CMBB seemed to have carried over.

[Bruno Weiss]

I'm running a GF4 Ti4600 on the 30.82 drivers. (Don't mess with the beta's). I'm using the 4XS (3D AA), slightly overclocked and it all looks great.

[Captain Wacky]

I find that minimizing CMBB and then maximizing it gets rid of all FSAA problems with Nvidia drivers.

[AnonymousOxide]

You guys should really consider ditching anti-aliasing, it's not worth the cost in system performance and the image quality isn't as impressive as everyone makes it out to be. I have more fun with it turned off, everything just works smoother.

[MRoadster]

Actually my experience has been mostly the opposite...

Things look better with AA and usually the performance hit isn't noticeable in many games if set to a reasonable level. Granted, I'll probably spend most of my time gaming with CMBB, but I have a couple of other titles that would benefit from the improvements in the 40 series drivers.

I'm considering going back to 30.82 b/c I'm used to CMBO/CMBB smooth graphics on a 21" screen. Believe me I can notice a difference if AA is off.

[MRoadster]

Back to 30.82 for the time being or until Nvidia gets its drivers sorted out...

[jiggles]

Originally posted by AnonymousOxide:

You guys should really consider ditching anti-aliasing, it's not worth the cost in system performance and the image quality isn't as impressive as everyone makes it out to be. I have more fun with it turned off, everything just works smoother.

Oh how wrong you are. The combination of FSAA and anisotropic filtering make CMBB/CMBO look just gorgeous.

In particular they really beat down the texture crawling you get when using hi-res modded scenery tiles. The anisotropic filtering is what really helps here, more than the FSAA.

If you card is fast enough (GF3+) all-the-toppings FSAA+aniso shouldn't really be a problem with typical large or huge CMBO maps. (Not sure what a 9 sq. km CMBB will run like though!)

[Gryphon]

Could you post a screen with FSAA and ASF at work?

[caligula_jones]

i just installed the 40.72 drivers, and everything works great... my 3dmark score even went from about 9000 to 9950!

system specs

i haven't tried CMBB w/anitialiasing yet, as for stability and framerate's sake i keep it off. my curiosity has been aroused, and i'll check that tommorow.

shane

[Voxman]

I have an ASUS Nividia TI4200 128 meg video card with the 30.82 drivers. How do I adjust the anti-alias ?

From what I heard about the 40 series drivers I was to scared to download them!

What exactly does anti-alias do and what the problems when it is on with CMBB ?

[jiggles]

Anti-aliasing is a technique which is used to reduce the jagged edges you see around the objects rendered by your graphics card.

Another feature supported by modern cards is anisotropic filtering, which helps reduce the shimmering you see in the ground textures in the distance in CMBO/CMBB (especially when using the hi-res modded textures). In my opinion the anisotropic filtering has at least as much if not more impact on CMBO/CMBB.

With 30.82 drivers you can alter the anti-aliasing settings from Display Properties -> Advanced -> GeForce -> Additional Properties -> 3D Antialiasing settings (on Win XP anyway).

You can't control the anisotropic filtering from the control panel, you should get a third-party application such as aTuner (available from http://www.guru3d.com/atuner/ ). Change the Direct3D settings to 4xS Antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic Filter, and the results are quite beautiful. In particular look at the distant map as you move the camera, there's a lot less noisy shimmering with both these settings like that.

If you play other games you should be careful to turn these off before playing, as they have a real big impact on the frame rate. It's not important in CMBO/CMBB, and your card should be quite capable of handling both these settings at maximum in Combat Mission.

The 40.xx drivers allow you to alter anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering from the control panel (so you don't need aTuner), and supposedly give better performance. I can't get them to run, so I'm sticking with 30.xx for now.

[Voxman]

Hello,

Where is the Display Properties found under WinXP ??

Originally posted by jiggles:

Anti-aliasing is a technique which is used to reduce the jagged edges you see around the objects rendered by your graphics card.

Another feature supported by modern cards is anisotropic filtering, which helps reduce the shimmering you see in the ground textures in the distance in CMBO/CMBB (especially when using the hi-res modded textures). In my opinion the anisotropic filtering has at least as much if not more impact on CMBO/CMBB.

With 30.82 drivers you can alter the anti-aliasing settings from Display Properties -> Advanced -> GeForce -> Additional Properties -> 3D Antialiasing settings (on Win XP anyway).

You can't control the anisotropic filtering from the control panel, you should get a third-party application such as aTuner (available from http://www.guru3d.com/atuner/ ). Change the Direct3D settings to 4xS Antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic Filter, and the results are quite beautiful. In particular look at the distant map as you move the camera, there's a lot less noisy shimmering with both these settings like that.

If you play other games you should be careful to turn these off before playing, as they have a real big impact on the frame rate. It's not important in CMBO/CMBB, and your card should be quite capable of handling both these settings at maximum in Combat Mission.

The 40.xx drivers allow you to alter anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering from the control panel (so you don't need aTuner), and supposedly give better performance. I can't get them to run, so I'm sticking with 30.xx for now.

[jiggles]

Originally posted by Voxman:

Hello,

Where is the Display Properties found under WinXP ??

Either:

a) right-click on your desktop, choose Properties, then Settings, or...

or

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Display

(How you get to them might be different, as I'm running XP Pro with the same user interface as Windows 2000, rather than the horrible plastic green/blue thing you get by default.)

[ October 05, 2002, 10:26 AM: Message edited by: jiggles ]

[Pascal DI FOLCO]

Should I bother trying the beta 40.72 drivers in hope of better fps ? Or will I rather get into compatibility troubles and bugs ?

I have an old Athlon500 anf GeForce2 MX440, so I try what I can !

[ October 05, 2002, 04:53 PM: Message edited by: Pascal DI FOLCO ]

[Mr. Die Easy]

Hi Pascal,

The 40.xx drivers are optimized for GeForce 3/4. I doubt you will see any fps increase with a GeForce2 MX440. But have you considered a mild (<10%) overclocking of the core and memory clock?

Best regards

Mr. Die Easy

[Scipio]

I have AMD XP2200+ and a MSI Geforce4 4600Ti

With the Benchmark '3DMark 2001SE build330' (standart settings without FSAA) I scored with the driver

30.82 : 10228

40.72 : 11152 (+ 9%)

I have problems with texts in CM if I use FSAA, but to be true, in CM is FSAA not so important, so I don't care when I have to turn it off. Performance increased by 9% is more important.

[Yank]

Howdy all. I'm also using the 30.82 drivers and they do work very well. I use them on a Ge-Force3 Ti200.

Oh how wrong you are. The combination of FSAA and anisotropic filtering make CMBB/CMBO look just gorgeous.

In particular they really beat down the texture crawling you get when using hi-res modded scenery tiles. The anisotropic filtering is what really helps here, more than the FSAA.

boy I couldn't agree more , If I disable either of these features my game looks kinda crappy. When I max those features, CMBB/CMBO become a thing of beauty. At least on my system they do. By the way I'm on an xp2100 with 98se.

[ October 05, 2002, 07:09 PM: Message edited by: Yank ]

[caligula_jones]

Originally posted by caligula_jones:

i just installed the 40.72 drivers, and everything works great... my 3dmark score even went from about 9000 to 9950!

update: i just upped my system clock to 150MHz, and my video card (GF4 4200ti 128M) to 298MHz core, 550MHz memory. now my good, old 1.33GHz athlon is just about as fast as a P4 2.0GHz.

and, as the final icing on the cake, my 3DMark2001 SE score went up to 10347!!!

ah, hotrod budget computers... killing germans hasn't ever looked so good!

[Treeburst155]

These drivers work for me (Win ME)just like the several drivers before them. I can use 4x FSAA or NO FSAA. Any other FSAA gives me a black screen. The anisotropic filtering is very nice however. I will stay with the 40.71s just for this, since the driver has no drawbacks that the 30.82 WHQL drivers don't have, at least as far as CM and CMBB are concerned.

Treeburst155 out.

[Pascal DI FOLCO]

Originally posted by Mr. Die Easy:

Hi Pascal,

The 40.xx drivers are optimized for GeForce 3/4. I doubt you will see any fps increase with a GeForce2 MX440. But have you considered a mild (<10%) overclocking of the core and memory clock?

Best regards

Mr. Die Easy

Yeah... it may be a good idea, but how do I do that without burning up my comp ? :eek: :confused:

[Mr. Die Easy]

Hi Pascal,

You are right - overclocking is not without risk, and it will only give you a relatively small performance increase. You need to decide carefully wether this performance increase is worth the risk. If you stay with a mild overclocking you would normally not run any risk.

There are several ways to do it - I use RivaTuner's low level overclocking features in combination with the benchmark tool 3DMark2001SE.

You start by increasing the MHz of the memory clock a small amount like 3-5 Mhz. Then you run 3DMark2001SE to see if you get any weird polygons, freezes etc. Then you increase the memory clock 3-5 MHz again, run 3DMark2001SE again and check for any graphic problems. And so on.

When you start seing weird graphics in 3DMark2001SE it is time to scale back the memory clock 3-5Mhz until the weird polygons disappears.

When you have found a good stable level for the memory clock you keep this level and start increasing the core clock in small intervals.

On the site guru3d.com, you can read a lot more about RivaTuner, overclocking, benefits, and risk.

Best regards

Mr. Die Easy

[murpes]

Originally posted by Gryphon:

Could you post a screen with FSAA and ASF at work?

These are uncompressed BMPs and quite large (~3 meg), so I won't post them directly. Just follow the links. Modem users use caution.

This image is 4X AA with mip-mapping set to "best quality."

This one is no AA with mip-mapping set to "fastest."

In particular, check out the road textures and how blocky they are. Also, the jagged-ness of the roofline and the smoothness of the house texture.

[ October 06, 2002, 03:15 PM: Message edited by: murpes ]