NVIDIA's New NT-Drivers for Athlon on KX133

If you have read my recent article about VIA's new Apollo KX133-chipset for AMD's Athlon processor , you might remember the bad OpenGL-scores that Athlon produced under Windows NT, when running with NVIDIA's GeForce256-card. Those scores were significantly worse than those of a Pentium III 800 and also much worse than Athlon's own OpenGL SPECviewperf-scores under Windows98. I suspected that something fishy was going on and received a lot of emails about this issue.

Surprisingly one of the emails to this topic came directly from NVIDIA and, believe it or not, it showed that NVIDIA had reacted to the findings in my article in a very swift manner. The email contained a new driver for GeForce and Quadro, which specifically enables all of GeForce's features on a motherboard with VIA's Apollo KX133 chipset.

New SPECviewperf-Results

I couldn't wait and ran SPECviewperf under NT with this new driver. The scores show that I was right expecting that Athlon should actually beat Pentium III (Coppermine) in this very OpenGL-benchmark. Have a look at the scores:

The chart shows results with Athlon 800 on KX133 with the official NT-driver rev 3.68 and then with the new driver that enables all of GeForce's features on KX133. The blue bars show Pentium III 800-scores using driver rev. 3.68.

What can I say? Athlon running on KX133 is indeed faster than Intel's latest Coppermine-processor running on the i840-platform! This is what we would have expected in the first place.