You can find those old drivers here:

ftp://download.nvidia.com/Windows/

It took forever but I found a download for Detonator 2.08 AGP.

There are also:
tnt120agp.zip
win9x188agp.zip
W9x-356.zip

but I couldn't find them.

1================================================================================
2NVIDIA RIVA TNT Display Driver for Windows 9x   version 4.11.01.xxxx, MM/DD/YYYY
3================================================================================
4
5Operating systems supported
6---------------------------
7Microsoft Windows 95
8Microsoft Windows 98
9
10
11Adapters supported
12------------------
13NVIDIA RIVA TNT
14NVIDIA RIVA TNT2
15NVIDIA Vanta
16
17File list
18---------
19NVAGP.INF    - Windows 9x display driver information file for RIVA TNT AGP
20               adapters (not present in PCI driver package)
21NVCPL.DLL    - RIVA TNT display properties extension
22NVCPL.HLP    - RIVA TNT display properties extension help file
23NVDD32.DLL   - RIVA TNT DirectDraw driver
24NVDISP.INF   - Windows 9x display driver information file for RIVA TNT PCI
25               adapters (not present in AGP driver package)
26NVDISP.DRV   - RIVA TNT display driver
27NVOPENGL.DLL - RIVA TNT OpenGL driver
28NVQTWK.DLL   - RIVA TNT taskbar applet
29NVARCH16.DLL - RIVA TNT interface layer to NV architecture for 16-bit clients
30NVARCH32.DLL - RIVA TNT interface layer to NV architecture for 32-bit clients
31NVCORE.VXD   - RIVA TNT Resource Manager kernel
32NVMINI.VXD   - RIVA TNT mini-VDD for VGA virtualization and device Plug-N-Play
33NVMINI2.VXD  - RIVA TNT mini-VDD for device Plug-N-Play of secondary devices
34README.TXT   - The file you're reading.
35VGARTD.VXD   - Windows 95 AGP support file (not present in PCI driver
36               package)

When I was playing around with a TNT2 a couple years ago, I believe I settled on 12.41 for 9x and 30.82 for 2k/XP. I can't remember the reasons why I picked them, but those are the ones I have archived for that card, anyway, and I don't think I would've kept 'em if they had sucked.

Thanks a lot for the info people! 😀 I'm going to test all of these versions mentioned. Recently, I bought a year's basic membership on DriverGuide. I'm testing lots of junk at the moment, and so it's been useful. Also, I did a search on that site for these "text strings", and found downloads for all of them, although I haven't tested them yet...

tnt 120agp //notice the space
win9x188agp //notice no .zip
W9x-356

😀

retro games 100 wrote:

I bought a year's basic membership on DriverGuide.

Ok, you know what to do...and whut we wantz u to do 😁 😁 😁 😉

For the TNT2, I never went beyond the Detonator 2.08s as my optimal solution. Basically that one was the goldmine for TNT2 users. Any newer reference drivers would cause some minor (but still annoying) issues in both games and my Windows desktop. My card (Diamond Viper V770 Ultra) may have had something to do with it, as the board itself is based off a completely different design from the reference one. But anyways it seemed newer drivers didn't give me any reasonable performance gains anyway. It'd be interesting to see if there's any major differences with the "much newer" drivers. 😀

I'm working on it! 😀 I'll be ready with my benchmark results today. It shows some interesting results. So far, I'm getting better results with the later versions. I'm testing 21 different versions, so it's taking a bit of time. Version 40.71 seems good, but I'm not done yet...

Very quick snapshot of 3DMark 99 Max test results:

Version 1.20, not overclocked = 4257. Overclocked score = 5378. (core @ 160, memory @ 166).
Version 40.71, not overclocked = 5474. Overclocked score = 6519! (core @ 152, memory @ 166).

Introduction
I'm testing an nVidia TNT2 Aopen PA3000 /PLUS 32MB AGP VGA card. After every test in the benchmark results table seen below, I ran DriverCleaner 2.7 (for Windows 98 ) to remove all traces of each nVidia driver package. I also rebooted the machine between each test. The test machine is: Epox KT133A, XP-M 3000+ running at ~1.6GHz, 256MB, 133 FSB.

The card

The card's POST BIOS info

Everest ultimate information
64-bit? That's a pity. So many of my TNT2 cards are 64-bit!

Vanta tab & other properties
These screenshots are taken using the oldest driver version, version 1.2; "4.11.01.xxxx" (from the readme.txt file) - the xxxx is 0120.

Example benchmark result
This is an "example" screenshot, using the oldest driver, version 1.2.

PowerStrip, shows overclocked settings
PowerStrip 2.78 can be found here.

Benchmark results table
(oc) = using overclocked settings, see PowerStrip screenshot above.
Conclusion: version 61.76 seems to be the fastest driver. The overclocked (oc) settings used for this version were 152&166. That's 152 for the core, and 166 for the memory.

Questions
(1) Is there any difference between a "Vanta" card, and a 64-bit wide data bus TNT2 card?

It looks to me like Vanta = TNT2 M64.

Those results are interesting. That the TNT2 M64 / Vanta could continue scaling upward in performance on an Athlon 1.6 GHz at 800x600x16 is curious (3dm99's default). Something is being optimized there. It might be affected by NV's image quality reduction hacks to speed up their later cards. It's also possible that 3DMark99 got some serious NV attention and is not representative of anything due to extreme optimizations.

I suggest using a game. Something that provides low as well as high framerate results. Maybe these two:
http://www.motherboards.org/articles/guides/1278_5.html
http://www.motherboards.org/articles/guides/1278_10.html

Thanks a lot for the ideas! I have just ordered the cheapest Serious Sam 1 + Gun Metal games (both Win98 compatible) I could find on ebay. I'll benchmark 'em when they arrive!

Tetrium wrote:

retro games 100 wrote:

I bought a year's basic membership on DriverGuide.

Ok, you know what to do...and whut we wantz u to do 😁 😁 😁 😉

Yes. Download every file they have and post them on Rapidshare so we can have them for free. 🤣

swaaye wrote:

It looks to me like Vanta = TNT2 M64.

Those results are interesting. That the TNT2 M64 / Vanta could continue scaling upward in performance on an Athlon 1.6 GHz at 800x600x16 is curious (3dm99's default). Something is being optimized there. It might be affected by NV's image quality reduction hacks to speed up their later cards.

You mean the cheat they applied to make your FX5900 Ultra appear faster than it really was in 3DMark03? 😜

sliderider wrote:

You mean the cheat they applied to make your FX5900 Ultra appear faster than it really was in 3DMark03? 😜

Yup those!! 🤣

Actually I think these companies optimize the snot out of all 3DMarks.

Does anyone know how to benchmark the game "Serious Sam"? I have looked on google, and every website says the same thing:

Press ~, then type /dem_bprofile = 1. Then go to the DEMOS section, and run a demo.

However, this doesn't do anything. I watch a series of looping demos which don't seem to end, and so I press the ~ again after a couple of minutes in the hope of seeing some FPS stats, but I don't see any. Occasionally, after stopping and starting the demos many times, and as if by random, I sometimes see the FPS stats that I am looking for.

Edit/Solved: I installed the patch. (You'll have to search for the same, because I can't link to the download directly on that "patches scrolls" site.)

Edit 2: I spoke too soon. I haven't solved this problem. It worked above, because of a random coincidence. I still don't know how to run the benchmark for Serious Sam. Any ideas please people? I just get to watch an endless series of looping demos, without seeing any stats, even if I press the ~ again.

Edit 3: I have solved the benchmarking problem. I have discovered a convoluted series of keystrokes that ensures that the benchmarking works. Now I've got it working, I will continue with my benchmark tests...

Serious Sam, 1024x768x16, Demo 5 - the last one in the Demo list.
Upgrading from driver 2.08 to 61.76 yields an ~8.5% improvement.

maybe newer drivers are more optimized for your k7 processor. i tried 8.05 and 30.82 on my p3-s platform, with only ~1% improvement.
versions between 40 and 60 do yield some improvements but they are also very unstable and must be avoided, so my preference are:
tnt: 8.05
tnt2: 30.82
from gf256 to gf5: 66.93
gf6/7: 93.71
and testing 3dmark99 seems a bit odd for me... never got it run under win2000.

Just one thing I'd like to mention with these old Detonator drivers with anti-aliasing support (TNT/TNT2): the anti-aliasing settings won't work unless the game that you are playing has the function built-in. So it's not true hardware AA, and even then, the performance decrease from enabling it isn't really worth it. I'm not sure starting with what driver version that this feature was taken out though.

I think the AA they are referring to there is edge antialiasing. It doesn't work like the full screen supersampling varieties that showed up with Geforce and Voodoo5. It also isn't multisamping so it can't be forced like that.

Edge AA wasn't popular because I think it is difficult to get working properly and it doesn't antialias polygons in all situations (like intersections). You can see it in many Rendition API games and in almost all N64 games.

Are you still looking for more drivers? I think I've got a few dozen of them flying around somewhere.

These are the last (Latest and Greatest) of the detonator drivers straight from Nvidia:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp-2k_45.23

http://www.nvidia.com/object/win9x_45.23.html