Nvidia Detonator 40 Drivers

BiT has looked at the Geforce 4 ti4200 from Gainward and the ti4400/4600 offerings from PNY, and found them to be excellent hardware. Although these cards are cutting edge when they leave the production line, they would be little more than good if it were not for the Drivers that push them to their limits. Over the past couple of weeks there has been a great deal of discussion about the Detonator 40 Drivers (40.41) from Nvidia; these drivers were expected to be hugely different from the Detonator 30 drivers for both performance and features. Let’s take a look at NVidia’s latest release with a critical eye and see what you can expect to see, through benchmarks, as performance improvements.

Unfortunately the Detonator 40 Drivers are currently only available for WinXP or Win2K, click here here for the 9Mb download.

These drivers are currently in the beta stage and therefore not currently WHQL certified. However, trying these drivers yourself and posting your findings in the forums will help the developers at Nvidia iron out any bugs and improve them for official release.

If you would like to know more before installing the Detonator 40 Drivers read on, here is a brief outline of the changes implemented within the release:

Up to a 25% increase in performance
This is quite a high claim to make, we will be looking at what performace increases we get over the 30.82 detonator drivers.

nView™ 2.0 multi-display technology increases productivity and provides the necessary tools to control the way users access and view applications.
This is a useful piece of software that I currently use everyday to have my dual monitor set up.

NVRotate™ enabling image rotation on today’s advanced flat panel displays.
This might not be useful to you however the LCD users amoung us might be able to make use of this

NVKeystone™ allows for real-time image correction on portable projectors and heads-up displays.
This is an amazing piece of software that allows you to set up your display with your mouse

Digital Vibrance Control™ allows users to adjust color controls to achieve accurate, bright colors under all conditions.

New control panel streamlines user interface and enables faster and easier access to all video settings
One of the more noticable updates to the drivers is the settings in advanced display options where you can set up Anti-Aliasing, Direct3D, OpenGL and a range of other options

Robust Channels enables higher faster performance and better stability for all applications through fail-safe paths in the drivers

CineFX Simulator allows developers to use Cg—“C for graphics”—to write complex shaders in a high level language faster and more easily than before.
This should help developers code you some nice graphics but the end user won't really notice by this update
One important note for all of you trying out these drivers is the importance of removing the previous version of the detonators, which up to now has not been necessary. This is achieved by going to the Add/Remove Programs section of your control panel and removing the entry named "Nvidia Display Drivers", then you will have to reboot and only then can you install the Detonator 40 drivers.