NV4TEHWI
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Alternative drivers ARE NOT alternative. - 2005/04/25 11:42
Bah. I'm about to rip these alternative drivers apart, so if you're a big fan... look away.
This is XG and NGO, mainly. I'm sure they are all the same. I was expecting some hardcore actual hacking, maybe to reduce geometry or some faceplane culling at the driver level, but so far of the three "aftermarket" drivers I've played with, they are just registry keys.
Nothing to do with the video drivers at all!. Oh and they love to modify SETUP.BMP, the little egomaniacs. Some added resolutions, now that's useful, but they all come from laptopvideo2go's original who never stated it was anything more than an inf modification.
I thought they were modifying the driver files, but doing binary compares on all the driver files themselves shows they aren't doing a damn thing to them! (don't even need to extract the .cabs, they don't repackage anything in them.) It's just configuration changes, not actual driver changes. This is so misleading. And why the hell do they package all the files again?! Why not just include the inf file? At least XG does this, but as a damn executable still. It's in poor taste to make executables that don't need to be, especially as a full set of drivers that need to be run with root priv. In the age of RUNME.EXE type idiots, they do this and don't even need to. And to make it more maddening, even as inf tweaks, a lot of it is just preferences... nView and NVTweak/NVCpl settings don't do anything for performance.
Maybe I'm missing something. Beside's your packager's ego, why not just put out the inf file then? Speaking of ego, adding that "by www.We'reSoCoolItHurts.com" to the card entries... I wonder if they get a collective chubbie seeing that in posted screenshots?  I grepped it out before installing, on principle.
Well, it's my own fault. I came at this with high expectations. Since unless you're an extremely good hacker and can get access to source by hook or crook (maybe from that trojan you stuck on nVidia developer machines, RUNME.EXE  ) you're only hacking via binary editing and disassembly... so I guess I my expectiations were too high to begin with.
But calling these alternative drivers is ludicrous. Alternative installer .infs and game registry tweaks that have nothing to do with the driver. And if you think you get different framerates between them, you might, per individual application, because they tweak THEIR REGISTRY ENTRIES directly. Some of them are nearly identical. Some of them are identical.
Optimized driver. Extreme driver. It's all bullshit.
Don't believe me? Download some and verify.
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[[ NOTE: I'm not saying it didn't make a difference. The HL2 keys that the XG driver changes gave me about 8-10 fps increase. But - it would have anyway, just the same, as a standalone 5-line .reg file using the nVidia official driver. ]]
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