WE HEARD WHILE we were on our holiday in Cannes, at our own and the INQ"s expense, may we add, that Nvidia is planning to introduce a new driver that will increase performance in certain applications since obviously there is always room for that sort of thing.
This is not news to us, since we saw many times before that Nvidia releases hidden performance from the driver, but in the case of the 5200 and 5600, this will have to do with new chip silicon recently introduced.
The new driver is to be called Detonator FX and it will result in five to 50 percent of "ballistic" performance increases depending on the application while the realistic rather than the ballistic indicates the number will be between 20 to 30 per cent.
If you haven"t noticed the latest driver available for download from Nvidia.com, the 43.45 is not WHQL – Windows Hardware Quality labs approved. Microsoft does not allow tweaks that can give you additional performance which is one of the primary reasons for WHQL
As far as we are aware, this will affect the FX generation of cards, while at press time we are unsure what benefits GeForce 4 or older cards will gain, if any.