NVIDIA GeForce 64 MB

Drivers: 5.13 vs 3.76

As the old saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. We have seen the benchmarks and examined how large of a bottleneck AGP texture swapping can cause on any system. Well, besides increasing the amount of RAM on a card, other factors can decrease the need for AGP texture swapping. For example, if the amount of textures being transferred could be decreased then the net result would be the same as adding more RAM. The secrete that every manufacturer of 64 MB GeForce cards do not want you to know is that the next set of drivers from NVIDIA will include just such a feature.

The recently leaked 5.13 reference drivers from NVIDIA are currently unsupported and said to be "broken" by NVIDIA. It is for this reason that we will not be supplying a download for the drivers nor a link to the downloaded drivers. The truth of the matter is that while they are currently unsupported not not fully functional, the 5.13 drivers result in a massive performance gain when paired with 32 MB GeForce cards. Using S3TC compression, the drivers are able to make use of hardware compression to shrink down the size of textures. If the amount of storage space needed by textures could be shrunk, this large amount of data could be compressed to fit inside the 32 MB space limit found on most GeForce cards. Due to the fact that the compression is done via hardware, no speed is lost during the process. Hands on testing also revealed no noticeable image quality loss.

The best way to explore what kind of performance increase can be expected with the 5.13 driver set is to benchmark using the drivers. Although the drivers worked in what appeared to be a flawless manner on the 32 MB DDR GeForce tested, the 64 MB GeForce card could not complete any runs of Quaver to test the improvement on a 64 MB system. Below is graphical representation of the speed increase to be expected due to this texture compression:

By looking at this data you can understand why both NVIDIA and video card manufacturers do not want the 5.13 drivers out yet. Releasing the drivers for public consumption would all but kill the demand for 64 MB GeForce cards. It is yet to be seen how much speed is to be gained by using the 5.13 drivers on 64 MB cards, however it seems logical that the gains would not be very large. The reason that the 32 MB GeForce is able to keep up to (and in some cases surpass) the 64 MB GeForce is because texture compression is preventing the 32 MB card from ever having to use the AGP bus as a mode of transportation. This is exactly what the 64 MB GeForce is preventing already by having such a large on card RAM amount. Compressing the textures for use in the 64 MB GeForce card would only mean that a fraction of the 64 MB storage area was in use, a quality that would not increase speed at all.