[an error occurred while processing this directive]September'2001 3Digest -
NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS 64 MBytes
This chip is presented by ABIT Siluro GF256 GTS 64 MBytes, AGP videocard.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]Features:
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):
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You can compare screenshots with reference ones (NVIDIA GeForce3).
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| Games / Cards | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 |
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Game list:
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. [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive] [an error occurred while processing this directive]
