Looking Back - The 6800 Ultra, ForceWare, and the Future

we are back again to wrap up our Looking Back series on the evolution of driver performance. As we saw previously, ATI posted some significant performance gains for both the R420 architecture and it's relatively similar R300 predecessor. Improving performance over 20% in most games, and in some cases doubling it entirely, ATI showed they were capable of working a great deal of performance out of their drivers long after the hardware was formed.

Of course taking apart the Catalyst drivers is just the beginning. NVIDIA, with their even more infamous reputation for driver-based performance increases, can't be ignored, so as promised we are back to take a look at just what NVIDIA managed to do with their ForceWare drivers and their NV40-based 6800 Ultra.