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- Date:
- Monday , March 01, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ForceWare 56.56 Review
NVIDIA's new Forceware drivers pack in new features worth review and while doing that we compare it to previous generations.
Driver Control Panel:
First of all just getting to the display properties for the video card has now been made even easier. All you have to do is right click on your desktop and click on the Analog Display selection, and it will automatically launch you straight to the NVIDIA driver control panel! Now that’s easy, and faster, no more having to go through Windows Display Properties, Settings, Advanced.
Before we go into the new features contained in this driver lets look at what hasn’t changed.
Above are screenshots from the Forceware 56.56 driver control panel menus that have not changed in this new driver set. Starting at the left we have the screen adjustment menu which lets you manually move the screen in any direction to adjust the position. Next is the monitor timing modes menu which lets you select timing modes in special cases. Typically you can simply leave this on Auto Detect. The next menu lets you adjust the color properties for your monitor. The slider a lot of people have come to love is still present, Digital Vibrance. The next menu is the overlay controls for video. The next menu is the troubleshooting menu where you can enable or disable the taskbar icon or force a TV connection if it is not being detected. The next menu is the rotation menu which lets you easily rotate your screen to a predetermined angle. The next menu is the temperature readout menu where you can see the temperature of your video card and enable a warning if the heat threshold is exceeded. The refresh rate menu is also present allowing you to force refresh rates at any resolution in games. The advanced resolution and color depth menu is also present.
Now let’s see what has changed.
The system tray icon menu has changed with this new driver. On the left is the 52.03 driver and on the right is the 56.56 driver. You will notice some new icons are being used and the OpenGL and Direct3D menus have disappeared letting the Performance and Quality Settings fly out menu control both. nView Desktop Manager has been moved to the very top of the list.
Nothing major here has changed, just showing the new driver version and now it seems this menu reports the CPU speed as well.
When you enable coolbits in the registry the overclocking tab will be present. When you first click on the Overclocking tab you now have to accept an agreement to overclock. As you can see NVIDIA has three new radio buttons present. You can leave it at the default which is No Overclocking. There is also a new Auto Overclocking option. This is what the help file says about it: “Specifies that you want to allow NVIDIA software to determine and dynamically set the highest safe clock frequencies for NVIDIA GPU and video memory.” This sounds pretty familiar to the Overdrive feature on the latest ATI video cards. (Do keep in mind though that NVIDIA has had native overclocking applications built into their drivers for years, but only available to the enthusiast if you knew how to unlock them.) The difference with this one is that it also overclocks the memory speed along with the GPU speed. Of course you can also select manual overclocking to tweak the core and video speed yourself.
Also when you enable coolbits the More Direct3D menu becomes available. Under this menu there are some very interesting options available. Under the Advanced Direct3D settings there is an option to render frames ahead. The next option down is to enable a Performance Graph. NVIDIA says this is a debug tool for developers, but it is a potentially interesting feature that shows you a real time performance data in games. The next option is Force textures to lowest MIP level which basically forces the video card to use the lowest MIP level available for textures. The other three options are to basically disable T&L, Pixel Shader 1.1-1.4 and Pixel Shader 2.0-2.x. While this might greatly improve performance it will also disable all the shader effects.
Performance and Quality Settings:
The biggest menu change is the Performance and Quality Settings menu. No longer are there separate Direct3D or OpenGL options. All those settings are now found under the Performance and Quality Settings menu. The default settings inside this menu that you can change are Antialiasing, Anisotropic filtering, Image settings, and VSYNC. When you click on a setting in the list the slider options for that setting are revealed below under the Setting Value table. For example above Antialiasing is selected, you can now uncheck Application-Controlled if you want to force the AA setting of your choice.
When you click the Show advanced settings check box there are more advanced options revealed. Force Mipmaps which we described on the previous page, Conformant texture clamp which is an OpenGL option, Extension limit and Hardware acceleration. The Hardware acceleration setting might come in handy if you are running multiple displays. You can right click on any of these driver settings and read a help file about each one.
Application Profiles:
Now, the biggest thing under the Performance and Quality settings menu is this little benign looking setting at the top labeled Application profiles. This setting is actually a bigger deal than it looks.
Have you ever run a game with a specific AA and AF setting and then wanted to play another game but found you first had to go into your driver control panel and change the settings because you preferred playing with different settings on that game? Doesn’t it get annoying always having to change settings for each game every time you go to start one up? What if you could just set all the settings you want for each game and forget about it? Well, NVIDIA has stepped up to the plate on this one and has delivered a feature that will make all gamers lives easier.
With the application profiles option you can actually set every setting you want for each game and save the profile for that game. When you launch your games the settings are automatically applied without you having to click any extra settings. It is extremely easy to use.
There is a list of games already included in the profile list. These games are pointing to the default directories for each game when it is installed. If there are some on here that you have and you have it installed in a different location you can easily modify the location. Since Halo is one game already included on the list you can see how we have selected Halo in the second screenshot. When we do that we now have the settings for that game we can apply to this profile being listed. If we want to override the global performance and quality driver settings we put a check mark in the check box telling the software we want to force these settings when we launch the game. As you can see we have selected AF and set it to 8X, we have also made sure Image Settings is on Quality and that Vertical sync is Off. Since AA is not supported in Halo we left that to Application-Controlled. So all we have to do is apply the settings and whenever we launch Halo it will run with NoAA at 8XAF with VSYNC off and at a Quality image setting.
Adding a new game is extremely easy. From the global driver settings option in the list you hit the Add button. It will then bring up the first screenshot you see above. From here you will notice the Global Driver Settings box is checked and I have entered a new Profile name called Flight Sim 2004. Then you hit the Browse button and you go find the EXE file for your game. In the second picture you can see I am selecting fs9.exe which is the executable for Flight Sim 2004. After you do that you will see Flight Sim 2004 now shows up in the drop down list. I can click on it and set up the settings I want to use for that game, in this case 2XAA/8XAF in Quality mode with VSYNC off. Now whenever I launch the game these settings will automatically initialize.
Play on my TV:
The ForceWare 56.56 drivers include a unique option. If you have your video card hooked up to a TV through the S-Video or Composite video out port then this option will be available. You can right click on any video file and click on the Play on my TV option and it will send the video straight to the TV, no extra steps required. Talk about making things easy.