Skyscraper's Doom 3 shootout project got me stuck into some benchmarking: Doom 3 timedemo shootout with period correct hardware.

So I did a quick and dirty test, upgrading the drivers starting with 5.13 all the way to 10.2.

It confirms what many have been saying, the newer drivers are usually not the best ones.

System is a socket 939 machine, Asus AV8 motherboard, VIA chipset, 4000+ San Diego CPU, 2 GB DDR400 in dual channel, AGP X850 XT, Windows XP SP3 and Doom 3 retail version un-patched (it runs faster). I took the results of the second run, it's always a tiny bit faster and consistent with subsequent runs.

Version 6.12 had the best performance for me.