Morgoth schrijft dat de Franse site Actu Micro hun GeForce2 GTS review nu ook in het Engels heeft gepost. De review is nu ook weer normaal te lezen, gisteren werd het zaakie vrij snel weer offline gehaald helaas. Heb je gisteren de kans dus niet gehad om de review te lezen: volg deze link even!
The GeForce2 GTS is an evolution of the GeForce256. It uses a 0.18µ process, which allows the processor to run at a whopping 200 MHz! The 32 MB of DDR will run at 166 MHz, which translates to an equivalent of 333 MHz. What else is new? Here are the main changes, compared to a GeForce256: The T&L engine has been enhanced, allowing a 30% improvement (we tested on P-III 600, i820, SDRam PC, not a very efficient machine but a quite popular one. Things do get a lot better if you have RDRam and a faster CPU). It is unfortunate however that so few games leverage T&L.
- The fillrate has been a key focus for Nvidia when designing the GeForce2. While a regular GeForce 256 can process 4 single textured pixels per clock, the new GeForce2 GTS’s pipeline can apply two textures on those 4 pixels… per clock! The Texel Fillrate reaches an impressive 1.6 Gtexel/sec.
- Thanks to the improved Fillrate, the hardware supersampling FSAA doesn’t have the same framerate penalty it did have on the GeForce256. Currently, the drivers only allow FSAA in OpenGL.
- The new chip architecture allows new –and impressive– visuals effects such as pixels shaders without any major performance hit. Those new effects give access to advanced controls at the pixel level, which can produce dramatic results on effects like bump mapping, spectacular lighting, etc. Once again, game developers have to implement this new feature so it may be a while before you actually see the benefits in a real life game.
Performance wise, the GeForce2 GTS really shines when using high resolutions. It outperforms the GeForce256 by at least 20 to 25% on our (modest) PC. We were a little disappointed not seeing a bigger performance gap. The bottleneck is no longer tied to the fillrate, but lies in the memory bandwidth. There isn’t much Nvidia can do about it until new –and much faster– memory hits the market. If you are looking for the best graphics board, period, you’ve found it (but we haven’t tested the Voodoo5 5500 yet –a matter of days). On the other hand, if you are already a proud owner of a GeForce256 DDR and you do not wish to play at higher resolutions than 1024x768, there is no major reason –beside FSAA, but then again, you might be interested by the new 3dfx product– to rush out and get a shiny new GeForce2 GTS.
For all you multimedia fans, there are a lot of possibilities built-in the GeForce2 GTS – TV Tuner, video-in, Mpeg2 decoding and encoding – but our sample board didn’t implement them. We’ll have to wait for the card manufacturers to send us their products.
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