How does
the GeForce2 GTS perform ?
You are an experienced gamer .. you want to hear some numbers right ? We have benchmarked
the videocard with a lot of Benchmarks to show you what the GF2 can and
can't do. We took some numbers with 3D Mark 2000, Dagoth Moor and the Quake
III Arena - Quaver Timedemo Bootmark. The benchmarks where done ranging
from 16 to 32 bit colors in resolutions from 640x480 (yeah, people still use it you know
!) up-to 1600x1200.
The benchmarks will be made with an i820 mainboard equipped with an 667
MHz Intel Pentium III Coppermine CPU.
I have make a note on this test sytem. It seems that this system is equipped
with a faulty Memory Translator Hub, memory performance is weak on this system
and is affecting high speed performance. The Q3A benchmarks in lower resolutions
should be higher in framerate than reported, I expect a new i820E mainboard soon and will replace
the benches with newer ones by then. None the less, the benchmarks represent a
good indication of what the performance can be like.
The benchmarks would normally
be made with
Creative's own and latest 3D Blaster control drivers. A very nice
bundle of drivers that are based upon NVIDIA Detonator drivers. The
drivers have been put in a nice jacket, here's what they look like:
As you can see, at default
you can tweak your Core and Memory clock speed without any hassle.
One tab to the right we'll
find Direct3D settings, hey what's that ? Hardware Anti-Aliasing !
Unfortunately this option did not work properly on my system with these
drivers. After Installing 5.30 drivers from NVIDIA it worked like a
charm!
Normally you'd need
patches, registry fixes to en/disable several functions like Side-Band addressing
etc. The 3D Blaster Control software gives you the opportunity to play
around with these settings without any problem. As you cab see we could
easily enable AGP 4x (no performance increase BTW !), Side Band addressing
and Fast Writes.
The 3D Blaster controls are really excellent to playa round with.
However, the performance in 1600x1200x32 bit OpenGL was dramatic. it was
50% slower than reference drivers from NVIDIA. In the benchmark tests we
will use standard reference drivers as we did for the 3D Prophet II.
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