The people over at TweaksRUs keep bringing us the latest and best tested information about NVidia and ATI drivers. Below is a section of their latest update, comparing a wide variety of available drivers.

For a long time it looked like we'd seen the last Windows XP driver. Nvidia's tumultuous love affair with Vista continued unabated, while old reliable XP sat neglected in the corner. Like all new toys, the shine finally seems to have worn off, and we've finally started seeing new XP drivers. Apparently somebody at Nvidia turned over two pages at once, and skipped a year's worth of driver numbers! Either way, it's been my dubious pleasure to put all of these drivers through their paces...

I have to admit that I normally approach any massive leap in driver numbers with extreme caution. At best they're usually alphas (that's very experimental, for the uninitiated) and at worst they're a recipe for disaster. The leap from the 90/100 series drivers to Forceware 150 series was originally cause for unbridled scepticism. (Treatment usually reserved for “picsha of teh nu Geefors 9900xtx” articles). Like most people, I didn't expect much when I tried them, and made damn sure I took an Acronis image first. I can happily say I was delighted to be proved wrong. Once again, Nvidia has done them unthinkable and squeezed even better image quality and performance from their drivers!

For all there's a massive numerical gap between 94.22 and 165.01, you're not actually missing much. Most of the fixes seem geared towards the 8 series, but there's a few new optimisations that'll be available in programs like Rivatuner. The main differences are in terms of image quality and performance, the basic features are more or less unchanged.

As usual, a word about the tests. Most of the drivers tested are technically 8800 drivers, but we've used a modified inf to make them compatible with the full back-catalogue of graphics cards.

Vista users might want to stop reading here, as I've still not been bored enough to install it, so I won't comment about performance there. (There you go, you can use the time you've saved to reinstall XP!). I'm also still too poor to afford an 8800, so I can't comment on performance there either.

There's also reason for haters of the new style Nvidia Control Panel to rejoice. They've not abandoned it, but it's been redesigned in more of a tree style. This has made it far more accessible, and it now prompts you to choose whether it runs in simple or advanced mode the first time you open it. Presumably the last design team have gone back to making toys for Fisher Price...