The battle of the drivers

Tweaked perfection or a bunch of cosmetic tomfoolery? James Matson gets friendly with the world of homebrew GPU drivers.

So you’ve got it – finally. That most incredible, advanced and damned shiny graphics card you’ve been waiting for since the last incredible, advanced and damned shiny graphics card was released.

It’s a thing of beauty encased in sleek black metal that reflects the hunger in your eyes as you lovingly caress the cooling fan mounted to one side. To compliment this masterful sliver of silicon, you’ve picked up the latest ‘games never looked this good’ FPS, complete with engine promises of real-time global illumination and gorgeously rendered environments spanning eleventy billion kilometres of game area. Good thing you bought that new video card, eh?

So you’re set; except for the little matter of drivers. Those sneaky little liaisons between hardware and the operating system often get less attention than they perhaps deserve. If you’re like most people, you’ll head straight for the NVIDIA or ATI website and grab the latest reference drivers for your card, and there’s nothing wrong with that approach. The drivers function, they get your GPU recognised, and gaming can commence unhindered.

But Atomican’s aren’t most people. We like our hardware to perform outside the boundaries of mere reference drivers and stock settings. We want to experiment, try the alternate – and sometimes shady – world of the non-standard. So there’s another place for people like us: the world of modded drivers. Atomic divided some time between benchmarking and chewing the ears off modding teams to discover exactly what these modded drivers are, how they get made, and whether they really are worth your precious download time.

Read on and be filled with geek knowledge!