Creative 30.82 drivers or NVidias 40.72 Drivers??

[Marktait 0]

Wat would be best to use for my Creative GF4 Ti4600??

 

Thanx for your input

[adamvjackson 0]

I always use the Nvidia reference drivers, never the OEM drivers, but that's just my $0.02.

[Christianb 8]

Hi Marktait - Hey Adam we meet again

Adam You're absolutely right. MarkTait I'm not familiar with your particular model of GeForce card, but unless the design of your card is significantly different from the GeForce reference design you should just use NVidia's drivers. Typically OEMs will add useless or next to useless enhancements and modifications to the drivers. An example might be a tray application for changing resolutions. I don't know about you, but I dont' change my resolution more than about once a week so for me I dont' mind just right click on the desktop. The tray application will however slow down system start up times and steal CPU cycles the whole timie your using your computer. Another and in my opinion far worse thing that OEMs do to the drivers is they will try to inflate benchmarks by either cutting visual quality corners or by hogging the CPU. While taking a disproportionate share of CPU time gives better Video scores in a benchmark, it will cause things like sound stutters in your games, because only your video card is getting enough CPU time (attention). The reason that OEMs will do such stupid things with their drivers is that they really don't care about their customers just sales. So they put an add in a magazine that shows that their GeForce is faster than everybody elses which is for the most part bullshit. Even if a particular model has faster ram if it's based off the same chipset and has the same ammount of ram there will only be about a 0-20% increase in performance. Simply put faster ram isn't everything. When I buy video cards I just choose a chipset. The last one I chose was a GeForce MX. What I look for is a good software bundle, like cool games, because if you're video card is about 130 bucks and it comes with 3 cool games, you got a pretty good deal . However if you saved 10-15 bucks and got a model without a software bundle you chose poorly. Anyways enough about that. Get the generic drivers unless you have some special add-on like a proprietary video capture card, TV tuner, 3D eyeglasses or something like that. Although I think the latest GeForce models do have a chipset that sports TV tuner and Video capture functionality (usually one and the same, but occasionally not). Also right after installing new drivers make sure you pay attention to how your games play:

is it slower?

is it faster?

does it crash?

is there any new visual garbage that wasn't there in the last driver version?

If things don't work as well just uninstall the new drivers and re-install the old ones.

Good Luck Amigo,

Christian