Drivers
New products always require a new set of drivers. It seems as though the two heavyweights of the consumer graphics market, ATi and NVIDIA, are tweaking their drivers more for a higher 3DMark score than for stability and compatibility. Although we used the most current driver release for Windows XP from each company (ATi: 6037; NV: 28.32), products from each competitor produced some visual glitches.
Here are a few examples of what errors some of the cards produced. The screenshots were taken in the games Aquanox and Comanche 4, two modern games that we use as benchmarks in our testing labs.
ATi Radeon 7500
Rendering errors and incorrect colors on reflective surfaces (Comanche 4 in DX7 mode).
ATi Radeon 8500
Missing textures on the jump ship (Aquanox).
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX
Incorrectly displayed menu - only on the GeForce4 MX series (Aquanox).
Rendering errors such as these should never make it past driver testing, and should definitely not pop up in an officially released driver.
If you come across similar rendering problems on the Radeon 7500/8500 or the GeForce4 with current drivers, we would appreciate it if you would let us know. Just send a short email to lars@tomshardware.com . Don't forget to include the exact model name of your card, the driver revision and operating system you were using, the name of the game, at what point the error showed up, and, if possible, a (compressed) screenshot.
