Best drivers for nvidia 6800 ?

[john-boi]

I know this might be a bit of a curve ball but maybe somebody out there can help.

I recently got a 32" LCD and obviously wanted to play games via the DVI to HDMI input.;-)

I was using some old drivers for my card around a year old these didn't have the full HDTV formats included (only 720p) so updated to the latest drivers which do (has all 4 ).The problem is in updating the drivers I have taken a hit in performance of about 10% according to 3dmark05.

SO my question is which drivers give the best performance for a AGP 6800 while having the option of the HDTV formats???

[kalniel]

Ignore 3dmark. Ask yourself if game performance has noticably decreased - it's more likely it's actually increased in games, and even if the fps average might be lower, it's probably smoother (higher minimum).

[john-boi]

Thanks kalniel

Thats reasurring.

In my old ti4200 days as nvidia moved up to geforce 5's then 6's the new drivers where optimised for the newer cards and actually reduced performance noticeably on my ti 4200.

But as you suggested haven't really noticed a drop in performence on the 6800 with the new drivers.Only seems obvious when running benchmarks?

[kalniel]

Personally, with my 6800gt, I found that newer drivers did drop fps by a very small amount, but the experience was smoother (noticable in Oblivion - early drivers gave real slow down with Oblivion gate refraction effects, more recent ones are really smooth). Sadly I have to swap back to old drivers for older games, but I think it's now best to match drivers with the age of games that you are playing.

I think if you haven't noticed any drop in performance at the wheel, then it's most certainly worth keeping the newer ones for the hdtv formats (and bug fixes in recent games).