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The V6600 is a phenomenal board with
all of today's and near future functions that you would like to
see for a High performance videocard. It is based up-on nVidia's hot chip
called the Geforce 256 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).
What's in the Box
In the box you'll find of course one v6600, a manual, driver CD
and two full version games Extreme G and Turok 2. Unfortunately, these
games are a bit dated and therefore will not pull your v6600 to its
maximum capability. But what the heck, it's free and better then
nothing.
Installation ran without any problems, remove your old Videocard,
insert the v6600 and boot up. I recommend you to skip the ASUS
installer since it is unnecessarily difficult and unclear. After your
boot-up go to your display driver properties, hit update, browse to
the drivers on the CD, in our case win9x, and hit install. After a reboot
you are set to go. (Don't forget to install the DirectX 7 drivers
BTW).
The driver CD contains drivers for
Win95/98 and Win NT based up-on version 3.48 Detonator drivers from
nVidia. There are also Win2000 drivers available, you can get them at
the website from Asus.
Furtermore you'll find DirectX 6 & 7 on the
CD (you want to install 7 for full compatibility). Last but not least
a demo suite from nVIDIA is included with demo's to show off your
v6600. Included and most important demo's are, TreeMark, Wanda, waves
and Bubble (which I loved the most). The Bubble demo makes use of the
GeForce's Cubic environment mapping. When you touch
the bubble it'll do weird things. Cubic environment mapping does
actually the same as Matrox's Bump-Mapping. Remember the bad guy from
terminator 2 when he walks out of the fire in chrome and he assembles himself from all
those tiny and small liquid chrome bubbles ? That's Cubic environment
mapping.
[ click to enlarge
]
DDR/SDR
The V6600 is equipped with SDR (Single Data Rate) memory. The GeForce
can actually also handle the new DDR (Dual Data rate) memory (which we will be
reviewing quite soon). When would you actually need DDR based
videocards you might say ? Well, let me try to explain is like this, your geforce with SDR Ram will work
fine in all resolutions and you will enjoy gameplay + framerate in all it's ways, however, for the more demanding gamers
& freaks (like me) you'd probably want a DDR version. At
lower resolutions, the video card isn't pushing more data around than
the memory can handle, but once you get up past 1024 by 768, the DDR
card should start (theoretically) to show significant improvement in
your framerate. The DDR memory allows twice as many memory operations at once
compared to SDR. This results in twice as many bandwidth. Preliminary
reviews from other sites show the real improvements only show up at
high resolutions, up around 1600 by 1200, which is my all-time
favorite resolution for playing games btw.
Transform & Lighting
What makes the GPU so special ? Well, it can render scenes in very
complex 3D applications and games without the use or very little use of your processor
due to hardware T&L (Transform and Lighting). The GeForce supports
every hardware accelerated function that for example a TNT-2 does,
however, it has the new added luxury of hardware T&L, a tremendous
step forward for real time 3D rendering.
In this small part we will try to explain Transform & Lighting
(T&L from now on). Transform actually is nothing more then the
transformation of the 3D 'space/data' of your typical game into 2D data.
When you look at your monitor you actually look at a 2D screens. When
you take a photograph with your camera the real world (3D) will be
transformed on a 2D photograph right ? That's what is getting transferred on the GPU/hardware. The
transformation is a tremendous amount of geometric data which will not
be handled by your CPU anymore (if supported by the software).
The "lighting" part is actually
very precise modeling dynamic light on surfaces.
For example, take glass and your your desktop light. Now move the
light around the glass for a while and
look at your glass. The light is reflecting, shining and moving in
several ways, that's Dynamic Lighting on surfaces. Dynamic lighting,
where object or light motion is accurately shown, is an extremely
processing dependant task, especially when you're dealing with
multiple light sources. Your GeForce can handle it with its GPU.
In general see is like this, the more your
videocard does, the less has to be calculated by your processor, the
faster your game will run with better and higher quality.
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