Forceware 163 Beta Comparison
nVidia has recently come under fire from its user base for its wavering support of the GeForce 7 family of cards, with driver updates focused almost exclusively on their flagship series 8 products, and no love for the less-than-a-year-old previous generation.
With the recent release of the official, WHQL 162 series drivers, nVidia resumed support and updates for yesteryear’s cards, though performance updates have been slow to come, and about 90% of development is still focused on getting DX10 support to the latest cards. Why they bother is beyond us, as there is nothing to do with DX10 as yet, but there you have it.
Today we take a look at the latest leaked Forceware drivers, 163.16, versus the official 162.18 release, with both synthetic and real life benchmarks. Let’s get started.
The Hardware
The test machine is a Dell Dimension 9150, modded to fit 2GB of RAM, and a Geforce 7900GS. Full specs follow.
| Machine | Dell Dimension 9150 (modded) | | CPU | Pentium D 830 @ 3.2Ghx | | RAM | 2 GB 667Mhz DD2 | | Motherboard | Intel 945P Express | | GPU | nVidia 7900GS @256MB on PCI-Express | | Misc | 80GB 7200rpm SATA HDD, Onboard 7.1 Audio |
Page 01: Introduction
Page 02: Testing and Conclusions
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