Before telling full story I would like to note that although it is related to ATI video hardware, general idea may be applicable to any hardware vendor.

I'm a performance junky so I always tried to squeeze as much as possible from my modest rig (laptop with C2D 1.8 GHz, ATI X1700, 17" CRT for gaming at 120Hz, 500 Hz USB mouse). To achieve this, I always installed newest ATI drivers as they came out (from Catalyst 7.2 to Catalyst 8.5). I experimented a lot with modded drivers (NGO, DNA-Drivers, OmegaDrivers to name a few). And I never was satisfied with end result. This dissatisfaction came not from low/unstable frame rates - no, frame rates was ok every time. What I wanted was responsive and fast mouse interface in any game I played, without any delay, lag or non-linearity added. And I had minor but noticeable problems with responsiveness every time, almost in every game.

Especially, I was dissatisfied with Quake 3. For some reason, it ran very bad, with very noticeable stuttering. I tried everything to remove it - from experimenting with Quake 3 configuration files to changing ATI display drivers to different versions. Nothing was helpful. After lots of attempts to improve situation I almost gave up, but did not stop to think how it may be resolved. I was sure that something prevents my rig from running it at its full potential. And it seems that I found the answer today.

The basic idea is simple - today's ATI drivers are overloaded with features. They support every card from Radeon X300 to Radeon HD 3870. Also, they have to support both Windows XP and Vista operating systems. The important part is that the same binary files are used to serve quite plain X300 as well as flagship product HD 3870. And this may be the source of performance problems.

I cannot tell what really happen inside ATI drivers. In my opinion, latest ATI drivers are optimized for most recent video cards on the market, compromising performance of earlier models (unintentionally, due to technical restrictions). But I cannot state this for sure, this is only assumption.

The fact is that after ATI Catalyst 6.11 drivers installation Quake 3 stuttering problems were gone. Quake 4 and Warsow feel now more responsive. Heck, even S.T.A.L.K.E.R has slightly higher frame rates!

Why this happened? Again, only in my opinion, Catalyst 6.11 supports X1950 as highest model, so I assume that these drivers are perfectly optimized for X1000 series, unlike most recent Catalyst 8.5 drivers.

So now, I have a system which almost as responsive as I need, using drivers more than one year old. Arrgh, I lost too much time to find out that everything I needed was available starting from end of 2006!

Of course, it may be only me. Nobody guarantees that this is not a cg_placebo effect. So I ask you, ESR readers (especially X1K video card users) the question, which is the title of this thread - How much of (video) drivers do you really need?

P.S. Forgot to mention that I use ATI tray tools to fine tune driver performance and that usualy I turn off any SMP features in games I play.