By Andrey Vorobiev
This chip is presented by ABIT Siluro GF256 GTS 64 MBytes, AGP videocard.
Features:
- NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS chip, 200 MHz clock rate;
- 64 MBytes DDR SDRAM memory in eight Hyundai 6ns microchips, 166 (333)
MHz clock rate , 128-bit bus;
- Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 800 megapixels/sec
and 1600 megatexels/sec.
Wasn't overclocked.
This card is the improved GeForce2 GTS chip released almost a year
ago. Actually it's improved GeForce256 with a higher clock rate and
two TMUs per rendering pipeline. The speed of T&L block has increased
according to the increased clock rate. But the relatively slow 166 MHz
DDR memory cuts the perfomance almost by half in 32-bit mode. Nevertheless,
it has been the best 3D-accelerator a year ago and now it's n the middle.
64 MBytes of memory do not make this accelerator faster, as memory clock
rate remains the same 166 MHz. This card is between GeForce2 MX (lower)
and GeForce2 Pro (higher). The manufacture of these cards has been stopped,
thus we should await them to be replaced by faster GeForce2 Pro. 64 MBytes
variants are unremunerative due to their high price (there are some
GeForce2 Pro card that cost less), thus they are bound to extinct. I
shall remind that 64 MBytes GeForce2 GTS cards have slower memory than their
GeForce2 Pro successors. These are, in fact, all differences between
them.
For the 20th of September'2001 the latest drivers from NVIDIA are 14.70
and 21.81. As the drivers differences are equal for all GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ultra
cards, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of
these cards. See NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro
64 MBytes 5ns
section for more information about drivers.
And now I want to attract your attention to another important 3D feature
- filtering. As many of you know, all chipsets support bilinear filtering
that is an important instrument in MIP-mapping, some chipsets support
trilinear filtering (true, not the approximation) and only few support
anisotropic filtering.
Due to the fact that GeForce2 and GeForce3 do support anisotropic filtering,
I recommend you to pay attention to the article about this feature.
I also advise you to read about S3TC influence on speed and perfomance,
because S3TC realization in OpenGL is important nowadays, and it shows
good results.
There's no criticism about 3D quality in all the games tested. I want
to mark perfect image quality and good speed in FSAA 2x2 and even 3x3
(that's rather actual for a 64 MBytes card):
You can compare screenshots with reference ones (NVIDIA GeForce3).
Game list:
- 1. Quake3
- 2. Unreal2 - for GeForce cards, Unreal - for all other
- 3. Unreal Tournament
- 4. No One Lives Forever
- 5. Serious Sam
- 6. Colin McRAE Rally2
- 7. American McGee's Alice
- 8. Mercedes Benz Truck Racing
- 9. Sacrifice
- 10. F.A.K.K. 2
- 11. Need For Speed V (Porshe 2000)
- 12. Real MYST
- 13. Blade of Darkness
- 14. Giants
- 15. 3DMark2001: Game1
- 16. 3DMark2001: Game2
- 17. 3DMark2001: Game3
- 18. 3DMark2001: Game4
- 19. 3DMark2001: Dot3
- 20. 3DMark2001: EMBM
- 21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders
- 22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders
- 23. Black & White
- 24. Undying
- 25. Anachronox
- 26. Max Payne
2D quality is outstanding. Soaping effects can be seen only on some low-quality
monitors in 1600x1200. But there are some low-quality cards present that
give soaping effect on good monitors. And I shall mark that 6.* version
drivers are not compatible with the software for sound cards based on
Yamaha processor, as well as with SoftXG100 software synthesizer. Start
or Close Window buttons can be spoiled by some "garbage" in
2D mode.
