ATI vs NVIDIA: Driver performance under Win98 & Win2K

Can't you be more like your brother?

If we think of the former 3dfx, ATI and NVIDIA as brothers, we were definitely pushing 3dfx and ATI to be more like their "brother" when it came to Windows 2000 driver performance.  The reason was simple; if you look at the performance figures we derived from running Quake III Arena's built in timedemo under Windows 98 vs Windows 2000 it was clear that only NVIDIA's drivers did not result in a performance hit when moving to the more robust OS. 

ATI Radeon Windows 2000 Performance 4 months ago

While 3dfx's performance was disappointing, our first benchmark session with ATI's drivers was horrifying; the performance difference between the two driver sets was so great that Windows 98 was often times close to twice as fast as Windows 2000.  ATI did manage to correct the performance issues we noticed last October in a later build of the drivers, but the performance delta remained. 

We are on the verge of being witness to the announcement and release of the next-generation of 3D graphics accelerators from NVIDIA, and later, from ATI.  But before we all even contemplate shelling out the big bucks as our "must-upgrade" genes kick in, it is time to get a much bigger and clearer picture of how the drivers of the two major competitors stack up under Windows 2000 and what areas need work on.  This time around, for a much more in-depth look, we will be focusing our performance tests in much more than just Quake III Arena, just in case a manufacturer decides to optimize for a particular game that the enthusiast community likes to benchmark under.  Instead, we gathered a total of 8 games and compared their performance under Windows 98 and Windows 2000.  Now it's really time to see which drivers are indeed perfect and which ones need work.