Reply 20 of 24, by mothergoose729
wrote:The 4x.xx drivers do have some cheats. They were cheating with 3DMark 03 and were caught for example. If you go newer though you can run into problems with some older games.
The driver optimizations aren't all bad. I mean they were optimizing for new hardware after all. The drivers have a shader compiler and that was being worked on for ex. However with some Shader Model 2 games there are some instances that NV replaced shader code and reduced its complexity so the FX cards could render them at a reasonable rate. I remember seeing Aquanox 2 screens with visible simplications. But would you even notice without side by side comparison? It's questionable really. But yeah it's best to just avoid SM2 games on those cards. The hardware is simply not any good at SM2.
Doom 3 is an interesting one to run on FX cards. The game is quite a good example of how to get the most from them. Less math more texturing tricks. And NV has the higher stencil performance just for that sort of rendering. ATI has problems such as their hierarchical Z failing to work with the rendering due to an oversight in the functionality there so their efficiency goes down.
Just curious, which games?