October'2001 3Digest:
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 32 MBytes 5.5 ns AGP
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By Andrey Vorobiev
This chip is presented by Gigabyte GV-GF1280-32E 32 MBytes AGP.
Features:
- NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 chip, 175 MHz clock rate;
- 32 MBytes SDR SDRAM memory in 4 EliteMT 5.5ns microchips, 183 MHz clock
rate , 64-bit bus;
- Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 350 megapixels/sec
and 700 megatexels/sec.
Overclocks to 220/200 MHz (see summary diagrams).
After the release of GeForce256 cards, NVIDIA representatives have began to
understand that following releases wouldn't replace previous cards due
to the short period between the new releases. Therefore it has been
decided to build a so-called 'ladder' of the market niches, so that
every accelerator would have belonged to one of them according its price
and perfomance. The release of GeForce2 GTS has been marked by a much
higher price for them than for any other of the previous cards. It has
been meant that a cheap solution named GeForce2 MX would follow the
release of more expensive variants to occupy a low cost niche and to
replace more expensive and less faster GeForce256 cards. So, the Summer'2000
has brought us GeForce2 MX that is still very popular today.
But there are many old videocards like Riva TNT2/TNT2Pro on sale, and
NVIDIA decided to release even more pared-down variant of GeForce2,
which, besides SDR memory, has been implemented with 64-bit bus. This
super slow GeForce2 MX was named 'GeForce2 MX200'. We are partly acquainted
with perfomance of such 'castrated' cards on example of ASUS AGP-V7100
16 MBytes. It seems that release of 32 MBytes variant will be of little help to
this artificially understated product. Read more about MX200/MX400 family
in the Video section.
For the 20th of October'2001 the latest drivers from NVIDIA are 15.50,
20.80, 21.83 and 21.85. As the drivers differences are equal for all
MX200 cards, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each
of these cards. See NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 32 MBytes section for more information
about drivers.
You can compare screenshots with reference ones (NVIDIA GeForce3).
Game list:
- 1. Quake3 Arena
- 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. Red Faction
- 8. Rally Trophy
- 9. Sacrifice
- 10. Venom
- 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
I shall mark that these cards sometimes have Z-buffer working incorrectly in
32-bit mode when Z-buffer itself is 16-bit, what causes artefacts. Such
problems were noticed on some games with Unreal Tournament engine. Thus
I recommend you to use utilities like Riva Tuner for fine tuning, and
pay attention to Direct3D settings of such games.
2D quality is very good for working with 21" monitors. Soaping effects
can be seen only on some low-quality monitors in 1600x1200. And I shall
mark that there are October be some incompatibilities of SUMA cards with
a number of motherboards and monitors. And 6.* 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.
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