The only way to put a new videocard to the test is by benchmarking it in as many ways you can try out that card.

I decided to skip the included Gigabyte drivers. When i first made a benchmark the results where nearly the same as the Magic TNT2. This should not be possible since the GA-660 is clocked at a higher (read +6.5Mhz) tact frequency. i decided to install nVIDIA's reference drivers version 1.88 which are released a few days ago. The result was exactly what i expected. There was a noticeable performance increase.

The following measurements will be based upon the earlyer mentioned system. The software that we will be using to test and compare this card is 3D Mark 99, 3D Mark 99 MAX, X-Bootmark, Final Reality 1.01 and Wizmark. All cards are measured with the same display setting. (in most cases 800x600x16Bit). Also, all cards that we test are at default settings. Which mean that we did not overclock them in any way. We honestly believe that 80% of the users which buy a 3D card simply do not even know what overclocking is and therefor we do not want to confuse them anymore then needed. For the freaks, memory is clocked at 156.5 Mhz and the Core/Engine also is clocked at 156.5 MHz.

First up, the benchmark results of 3Dmark Pro. The results will be shown in all prefered modes. At the following benchmark you can see the results compared to the Magic TNT2, Voodoo3 3000a nd Voodoo2 SLI.

As you can see, GA-660 is slightly faster then the Magic TNT2. once again this is the result of a higher clockfrequency. The 660 can do this since it has really good cooling. The TNT2 chip is cooled with a ball-beared fan and at the other (back)side of the card a coolingbracket/heatsink  has been installed to asure optimal cooling on both sides of the chip.

Copyright 1999 - All rights reserved Hilbert Hagedoorn

100% hardware triangle setup

Optimized for Direct3D acceleration with full support for DirectX6.0

32-bit ARGB rendering with destination alpha

24-bit Z-buffer, 8-big stencil buffer

Anisotropic filtering (better than Tri-linear MIP-mapping)

Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping including Fog, Light, and MIP-mapping

High performance 128-bit 2D/GUI/DirectDraw acceleration

250M Pixels/Sec. Fill Rate

Video Acceleration Hardware YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 color space conversion support

Multi-tap X and Y filtering

Support planar YUV12 (4:2:0) to/from packed (4:2:2) conversion for software MPEG acceleration

DVD sub-picture alpha blended compositing

Video acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1

AGP 4X Sideband Support AGP 4X/2X/1X mode with full sideband/Execute mode support

Supports over 900MB/sec in AGP 4X mode