What are reference drivers?

I hardly ever update ymy Voodoo 2 drivers but have bought Black & White and have found I need to. When looking for drivers, I have discovered 'refernce drivers'. What are these and are they any different from normal drivers?

I've seen this a lot on the Net. I believe it means that they are the correct drivers but that nVidia refuses to 'warranty' them; i.e. they are as is and will probably work fine, but they want to throw the responsibility for any problems that arise with them back onto the person who sold you the video card in the first place.

take a company like nVidia. They "give" their chips, such as the GforceII MX, to another company such as Asus. Asus then makes a video card based on the graphics chip and makes custom drivers for their specific card. Now nVidia is always coming up with new features that may take companies such as Asus a little longer to incorporate into new drivers. So nVidia releases referrance drivers based on a very basic card design that most third party companies, such as Asus, must conform to.

So, if your particular card has a certain feature that is incorporated in their specific drivers, then using referrance drivers might be bad. On the other side, nVidia might have a new feature that may make using thier drivers benificial.


Another factor to consider is a company like 3dfx. After the Voodoo2 was released they bought STB. Companies like Diamond, who had the Monster3D, were left out and did not make updated drivers for thier cards, since they were moving on to new chips. However, 3dfx knew that they couldn't abandon their users and subsequently released the referrance drivers that incorporated new directX features as those were released.
nVidia, on the other hand, still continues to support cards based on their older chips long after companies had stoped making them. Cards such as the TNT and TNT2 will benefit the new driver release because they have new features that users might not get from the Card Specific drivers.

Thanks guys...Lycia....? Didn't quite get what you were talking about, but never mind. :confused:

To try to clarify for you, Bluff, Video Chip manufacturers produce a standard card design for a chip, known as the "Reference Design". Reference Drivers match this standard card design. Another manufacturer can buy the chips and make a card to the reference design and supply the reference drivers, or design their own card (maybe with more features or speed) and provide their own drivers.

The trick for you is to know if your card is a reference design. It is usually best to use the latest drivers from the card manufacturer, as they should get the most out of that card. Reference drivers should work OK, but may not use all the features of a card which is more than the standard reference design.

However, if the card manufacturer has gone out of business or lost interest in updating the drivers, more recent reference drivers may give better compatability or performance.

It's as lycia69 and Platypus said - they are the standard drivers released by the chip manufacturer for the standard graphics board first released by chip manufacturer.

As for a Voodoo2 with Black & White? My friend, it's time that you got a new video card.

Considering that many decent ones (such as the GeForce2 MX) can be found for less than $110 bucks, it wouldn't hurt to simply get a new one. Since you have a Voodoo2, you obviously have another card to use in 2D environments. Getting another card will free up a PCI or AGP slot for you as well.

Slightly off topic, but if you want to play Black & White and have it run smoothly (read: playable) you're going to need a lot more than a Voodoo 2. Like Paco said, get a Geforce MX. Since the Voodoo 2 is an accelerator, you can still keep it in your system, if you have any games that have to use Glide.