First post, by tenyuhuang
While building my own Windows 98 machine, I took a scenic route and benchmarked my Ti4200 against various versions of Nvidia driver.
It seems that performance DO get worse as the driver get newer and newer as opposed to a speculation where they could get better with a certain update.
I didn't benchmark EVERY single version of the driver, so I might be missing the gap; I'll be glad to know if the few versions I missed actually had performance boost.
Below is a detailed datasheet of the benchmarks; as a reference, I've included a 3DB result browser database in the attachment.
A few notes regarding this test:
1) All benchmarks were ran twice, and the better of two was kept individually;
2) The Ti4200-8x runs at AGP2x, on VIA 4-in-1 4.35;
3) System main bus runs at 133MHz, with PCI clocked at 1/4 ratio;
4) The OS is a clean install of Windows 98 SE without any updates except Direct X 9.0c;
5) Power is rated at 350W - shouldn't be a problem.
There always seems to be this mystery around Nvidia drivers, and there doesn't seem to be a certain conclusion, either.
I hope this little test result could be of help.
Of course, there could be some human errors introduced due my lack of experience (even though I didn't change any hardware or software except for the driver); that said, if you noticed anything wrong in the database (which included my test system and environment), I'm eager to know 😊
