NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS

The drivers we were supplied for use with the GeForce 2 GTS were the Detonator 5.16 drivers, and they offer a couple of improvements over the other 5.xx drivers that have been leaked; however, their biggest improvements are those held over the 3.7x driver series that most GeForce users are currently running.

The 5.16 drivers enable S3TC support under OpenGL games that take advantage of it, such as Quake III Arena.  With S3TC enabled, a 32MB GeForce came close to the performance of a 64MB GeForce, and since the GeForce 2 GTS benefits from the same S3TC support, there isn’t a real need for a 64MB GeForce 2 GTS board just yet.

At the same time, NVIDIA just recently released beta drivers for Xfree86 4.0 with support for OpenGL acceleration.  While these drivers are still in beta, it is a start for future support for the ever-growing Linux user base from NVIDIA.