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| Installation
and Drivers Of The Siluro GF256 GTS
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| Cool
breeze but nothing too exciting |
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The
Siluro GF256 is a little too generic for our
liking, as far as software goes. You do get
the added bonus of the bundled in games, something
that is falling by the wayside with most
manufacturers. This is a nice touch but the
games, Test Drive 5 and Shogo are a little out
dated. Furthermore, the driver suite that Abit
has on their install CD ROM was based on a very
old version of the nVidia reference drivers
(3.93 I think) and not of much use these days,
especially if you want FSAA.
This
is a shot of one of the Abit control panels.
Yes
indeed, those are version 3.93 Detonator drivers
there. There isn't much else to comment on
here except to say that we hope Abit revises them
to at least the currently released 5.22
version. The Abit
Siluro web site has no updates listed for the
card either.
Click
to see Abit's goofy mascot and the contents of the
Driver/Utilities CD
However,
also on the driver CD is a full version of WinDVD
which is an excellent DVD Movie Player. This
augments the great DVD playback capabilities of
the card.
So we
moved on to the nVidia
5.32 version Detonator drivers, in an effort
to be able to over-clock the Siluro GF256 GTS and
tweak it for FSAA etc.
Full
Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA):
First let's look at how nVidia has been
doing with respect to FSAA since the GeForce2
launch. Things certainly have improved
somewhat, from a driver support perspective.
Here are a couple of FSAA shots first in
OpenGL driven Quake3 and then in Direct 3D Driven
USAF from Electronic Arts.
OpenGL
Quake3 Arena 1024X768
Gorre brought to his knees in FSAA
Direct
3D USAF 1024X768
Smooth Sailing
Original
TGA Images can be found here
for the Q3 shot and here
for the USAF shot. In our eyes, the
Quake3 shot still is not up to par with 3dfx style
FSAA. This shot was taken with the
"enable full scene anti-aliasing" button
checked off, under the OpenGL control panel.
There is only one setting accessible to the user,
on or off. We have heard of ways to tweak
the level of FSAA in OpenGL games but are unaware
of how to go about adjusting it. It is also
not obvious to the average end user ( it is some
sort of registry hack ) so we felt it was only
fair to judge based on what is available out of
the box.
Direct
3D FSAA is another story however. Things are
looking up in this area for sure. Here is
the setting we used for the USAF shot.
This
is nVidia's setting for 4X FSAA. As you can
see in the above shot with Janes
EA's USAF, things are pretty sharp
indeed. As a side note, FSAA is definitely
less useful in games like Quake3, where you are
less likely to notice its advantages with the fast
pace action going on. On the other hand,
good FSAA in a Flight Sim like USAF, is a
god-send. At 1024X768 with 32 bit color, you
will be happy to know that frame rate was
excellent and the game was totally playable.
And on
the eight day God said "let them
over-clock"...
Overclocking
and Gaming Performance
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