The battle of the drivers

Now that we’re familiar with the ins and outs of modded drivers, the scene is set for the real question, the one that seems begging to be asked from the outset. Are modded drivers any good? We know that’s the ultimate query and the only real one that matters. To that end, we’ve put several driver sets from different modding teams through their paces and have the results to show for it in terms of performance and image quality; with a few caveats, however.

Although ATI and NVIDIA are reasonably precise about the continued release of new driver sets, modding teams are not. Due to this, we had to balance the desire to have the most recent drivers available against getting third party driver sets to align in version against the reference ones. Check out the table lumped in with our benchmark results to see exactly what versions we ended up using, but in short we ran the ATI Catalyst 8.7s against as many modded 8.7 sets as we could and the NVIDIA Forceware 169.25s matched with as many sets based on the 169.25s as possible.

Obviously there were newer reference drivers (and in some cases modded drivers) available, but this gave us the most even spread possible. The downside of all this numeric nonsense is we couldn’t run the XFX GTX260 through its paces, because it wasn’t supported in the Forceware 169.25 drivers, opting for the XFX 8800GT instead. We did try our best to persuade the various modding teams to release completely up-to-date drivers in time for this piece, but they kindly informed us that if we continued to sit outside their respective bedroom windows naked and covered in baby oil, they’d call the cops. Cest la vi.

Where to get them
Here’s a list to get you started on where to find modded drivers out there on the internets. Just a word of warning though – not all these places are timely in getting drivers out in sync with the official releases, so bookmark like crazy and keep coming back.

www.ngohq.com
www.donotargue.com
www.omegadrivers.net
www.tweakforce.com
www.driverheaven.com



System specs
CPU: Intel Quad Core Q6600 @ 2.40GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte P35-DS3P
Memory: OCZ PC2 6400 Dual Channel 2 x 2GB
GPU: XFX NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT/Gigabyte ATI HD4850
Storage: 3x WDC WD5000AAKS-00YGA0 ATA 500GB
O/S: Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit

Benchmark software
3dMark06 Professional Edition
HardwareOC Unreal Tournament 3 Benchmark tool
Crysis Benchmarking tool

ATI Results.

NVIDIA Results.