3dfx Voodoo4 4500AGP

Windows 2000 Driver Performance

While not always as bad as ATI has been in the past, 3dfx hasn't exactly had the best driver support under Windows NT. They have recently started to get their act together and while their drivers have generally been solid under Windows 9x, we have yet to be overly impressed with them under NT. Now with Windows 2000 growing in popularity and more people using it as a home/office, professional and gaming OS, it is very important to see how a manufacturer's drivers stack up under this OS.

We used the latest available drivers from 3dfx under Windows 2000, they are dated September 29, 2000 and are version 1.03.00.

Once again we see a manufacturer that has not given the same amount of attention to their Windows 2000 drivers as their Windows 98 drivers. For 3dfx this does make some sense since the bulk of their customers are running Windows 98, however there is still no excuse for Windows 2000 drivers being any slower at all.

At 640 x 480 x 32 the Windows 98 driver is 33% faster, but the lead decreases as the resolution increases. At 1024 x 768 x 32 the difference is "only" 20%, which is still pretty bad.

For comparison's sake, the GeForce2 MX produces the exact same benchmark numbers under Windows 2000 as it does under Windows 98 using NVIDIA's officially released Detonator3 6.31 drivers. The only exception being at 640 x 480 x 32 where the GeForce2 MX is 3% faster under Windows 2000. That is just to show that it can be done, it's just up to the manufacturers to get it right.

It does make sense that Windows 2000 performance should be equivalent to Windows 98 performance, and at lower resolutions it should actually be faster since Windows 2000 is a more robust OS.