It's probably going to be a game of trial and error to find the best drivers for your system. I usually start with the older drivers and work my way through them till I find one that works the best.

You generally want something that is somewhat newer than the games you want to play on the card, so it is aware of them and developers have tested their games on something close to it. If you go with much newer drivers, they tend to become slower on old hardware, there can be regressions with old games, and the driver is getting larger because it has code for hardware you aren't using.

Should probably try something more like 28.32. That's a GeForce 4 era driver (2002).

I've been using 12.41 with Windows 98SE and a GF256.

Detonator 12.xx

I don't have a Geforce1, and most of my experimenting has been with a GF2MX running on a K6, not a P3, so your situation is a bit different than mine. But the version range that seems to work for me are in the 5.x-12.x range. For me I think 8.x seemed fastest in general among those that I've tried. I don't remember the exact subversion but it wouldn't be meaningful since it's not like I've tried all of them. 😀 I also saw some odd bouncing back and forth where different versions were faster with different games.
Things might be more consistent with the P3 though, since nVidia cared a lot more about that CPU. The P3 might also keep up with somewhat later drivers than I mentioned, but I wouldn't expect to get good results with a version as late as you're using.

trixster wrote on 2020-08-13, 20:46:

Hi all, […]
Show full quote

Hi all,

I’m a bit confused as to which drivers will be fastest for a Geforce256 DDR in my PIII 933 Windows XP machine. There are so many drivers out there it’s hard to know which one will give me the best performance as I recall some later ones really dented speed.

Is there a definitively best and fastest driver out there? The reason i ask is because Unreal 1 with the last patch (not gold) only manages 44fps timedemo on the castle at 1024x768 which seems pretty slow. With the drivers I’m using (61.77) I’m getting 4784 in 3DMark2000

Thanks!

My Super 7 system with a Geforce 2 MX400 and Windows 98 using the 8.05 driver consistently scores around 3,345 in 3D Mark 2000. You have a better card and a much better CPU, so you ought to be getting a higher score than that. Phil's archive only goes back to 45.23, but it's a good place to start. https://www.philscomputerlab.com/nvidia-xp-gr … cs-drivers.html

Who needs Phil?
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/

And the thread topic is Windows XP drivers.

swaaye wrote on 2020-08-14, 00:32:

Who needs Phil?
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/

And the thread topic is Windows XP drivers.

I linked to XP drivers. But yes, I see the Vogons archive goes back even further, so more to choose from.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2020-08-14, 00:57:

I linked to XP drivers. But yes, I see the Vogons archive goes back even further, so more to choose from.

Ah sorry. I thought you were the 3rd person to suggest 98 drivers. 😀

I think the first official XP driver was 21.81.
https://web.archive.org/web/20011221234229/ht … _20010907751234

21.83 is supposed to be more stable, but ya that was the 1st driver that supports desktop acceleration with XP.

Many thanks for the messages so far 😀

I’ll give 21.83 a go!

I’ve managed to get my flashed Mac voodoo 5 working in this machine too, so it’s fun to do a few comparisons between the cards

hmm, 21.83 appears to be a win98 driver, no mention of xp in the installer.

Give 28.32 a try. I just installed XP on my current KX133 + GF256 setup and it works great so far with a few OpenGL and D3D games.

The GeForce 256 is slow 😀 don`t expect to much.

its one of the most overrated cards ever..

Sure, that’s understood, but it doesn’t help with my driver question 😀

I have the Geforce256 in this machine purely for nostalgia reasons, as this is a card I owned back in 2000

trixster wrote on 2020-08-14, 16:06:

I have the Geforce256 in this machine purely for nostalgia reasons, as this is a card I owned back in 2000

What games do you want to play on it? I've been playing a bit of Max Payne, Quake 1-3, Sin, UT, Elite Force this week. I have a ton of stuff installed on the drive and use it mostly for Win9x builds.

It runs most <= 2000 games well at 1024x768x16. It is what it is. It's clearly faster than the G400 Max I've been using too.

Win 2k drivers will work fine.

I did a double take when I saw the OP's account name but as it turned out, this isn't actually MobyGamer

sorry, that's gone over my head.

trixster wrote on 2020-08-16, 11:09:

sorry, that's gone over my head.

Sorry.

There's a guy well-known in the community who's been known as "Trixter" online for nearly 30 years.
https://trixter.oldskool.org/
He also became known as "MobyGamer" back from when he founded MobyGames.com.
https://usesthis.com/interviews/jim.leonard/
https://twitter.com/MobyGamer
https://github.com/MobyGamer

I was just kinda commenting to let the old farts around here know that you were not him. After all, you spelled it differently, and he already has the account named "MobyGamer" here years after he more or less retired from MobyGames.. 😉