TNT2 driver? (Detonator 3)

I had a CL tnt2U until last week. I just upgraded to a GF2. I noticed a good improvement, but unfortunately not worth the 300 USD i spent on that card. =(

however, in all my days playing with my old beloved tnt2, i was never dissapointed by it's performance. i was able to play at 1024x768 at 16 bits, with texture/world detail set to high and get very good performance.

i tried the detonator 3 and i found them very unstable, both in my tnt2u and in my gf2. i am using winme and i have a Asus p3v4x Mobo (a via apollo 133a chipset). i did not see the promised 'up to 50% increase inn performance' either. my max supported resolution is 1024x768 so i couldn't check the higher ones.. maybe in 1600x1200 is where the 50% improvement hides. =)

Also, the detonator 3 drivers (6.18) are focused to improve performance on geforce cards. a lot of users have even reported severe drops in performance with tnt's on 3d mark 2000 results.

but at least in my rig, they did not improve performance significantly, and were very unstable. so i am back with my trusty 5.32, which by the way became the new official detonator 2.

by looking at your system specs i can see that you definitely need to upgrade that system or play at low resolutions. NVidia caRDS have always had some kind of trouble with UT and d3d that makes them eat memory like there's no tomorrow. even epic admits that if you have less than 128MB your performance could be probably unplayable becasue of very heavy hard disk trashing.

in the beginning they said it was a driver problem and they were in talks with nvidia to fix it. hehe. yeah right. we've gone from 3.xx to 6.xx and the drivers still eat tons of memory.

another point is your processor. you may try getting a new celeron FC-PGA. you should see a very nice increase in performance. i believe that 266 just doesn't cut it.

so far this is all i can help.
get rid of det 3, and install 5.32 or 5.30. they are much more stable and at least for me, practically just as fast as det3.
get more memory. it's cheap those days
and if possible change that processor. or at least try overclocking it.


Good luck =D

Just remember the detonator3 drivers were mainly made for the Geforce cards. I did squeeze out about 5 more FPS and my render depth is deeper. Just my 2 cents.

I didn't notice a huge framerate increase with them (I'm using a TNT2-U), but overall I get smoother performance/less crashing. What's really holding your framerate back is that 266 PII. You should upgrade that to at least a 500-600MHz Celeron and it wouldn't set ya back too much.