There has been a lot of talk lately about NVIDIA cheating on benchmarks with there new Detonator FX drivers so I wanted to do some testing to see how far these claims really went.  What I found to say the least, was exactly what everyone has been talking about. They say that NVIDIA has been optimizing their drivers to gain higher scores on 3DMark 2003.  Basically the way it works is the driver can sense when a benchmark is running and it turns the eye candy down to gain a higher score. In affect you get a better score with worse graphics.

For those that don't know, NVIDIA for some time now has been making their drivers in a Unified Driver Architecture that supports GPU's as far back as the TNT.  For NVIDIA users this has always been convenient and the driver updates are often. Today we will be testing the Detonator 41.09 against the Detonator FX 44.03. You can download the Detonator FX 44.03 drivers here for Windows 2K/XP and here for windows 9x