NVIDIA New Reference Driver 12.xx More Power For Pentium 4?

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Introduction

Writing about new NVIDIA drivers feels somewhat strange. First of all, drivers in general happen to be under constant development. Particularly drivers of graphics cards however are almost changing every week. Only a major change in terms of performance or general behavior is making it worthwhile dedicating an article to a new driver release. We decided that NVIDIA's latest 12xx-series of (of course unofficial) drivers is worth a closer look.

NVIDIA has a very special situation when it comes to its driver support. While NVIDIA's rather huge software department under Dwight Diercks is constantly pumping out new driver revisions on an almost weekly basis, NVIDIA is rather unwilling to openly share those latest drivers with its broad customer base of hundreds of thousands of end users. Don't just take my word for it! Pay a quick visit to the official driver section of NVIDIA's website and you will find that the latest officially available NVIDIA graphics card driver carries the revision number 6.50!! You can even read the date when NVIDIA released this ancient driver version! It is no less than half a year old, from December 4, 2000!

Let's quickly remember what happened in the last six months. Since December 2000 NVIDIA has released a lot of new graphics chips as well as chip versions. GeForce2 Go, GeForce3 and lately the 'customer confusion products' GeForce2 MX100, MX200 and MX400 sum up to altogether 5 different graphic chips or chip versions. Each of those is younger than NVIDIA's latest official reference driver, creating a situation that is rather bizarre.