NVIDIA GeForce 64 MB

Conclusion

Not only are 64 MB GeForce cards hard to come by on the retail market, the are also very costly. While they only cost a fraction of the cost of the 64 MB Quadro, they are still significantly more expensive than 32 MB DDR GeForces. The question is "does the increase in speed justify the increase in price?"

Let us first ignore what we learned in the last section about the performance of the 5.13 drivers on a 32 MB GeForce card. The 64 MB GeForce seems to offer some advantages over 32 MB GeForce cards. For example, a 64 MB GeForce card pretty much makes every level in Quake III Arena playable at 1024x768x32, a goal that remained unfulfilled until now. In addition, by preventing AGP texture swapping, the 64 MB GeForce prevents those times in games where you wonder what your system is doing. Not only are the sporadic skips and jumps annoying, they can also cost you a win. From this aspect of the card, the 64 MB GeForce seems like the product many have been waiting for.

We will continue to disregard the 5.13 driver issue for a bit longer so that we may examine the down sides to the 64 MB GeForce. First there is the price issue. Costing significantly more than DDR GeForce cards. If price is of no concern, availability must be of some. It is almost impossible to track down one of these cards for retail purchase. It may be easier, in fact, to order a new computer from Dell and wait at least 3 weeks to get your 64 MB GeForce than to try and find one of these cards on the market. Both of these drawbacks combine to bring up a new problem: if you have to wait so long and pay so much, why not wait a few months until the new NVIDIA processor, code named the NV15, comes out? It seems difficult to pay over $300 to get a video card that may easily be dwarfed by NVIDIA's latest creation.

Now for the drawback that has been placed to the side of our minds: the 5.13 drivers. As the tests in the previous section show, significant speed is to be gained by using the 5.13 driver set. Although we are currently unsure how the final S3TC texture compression will work, we know that if the tests above are any indication there may not be a market for 64 MB GeForce cards for much longer. It is really too early to tell (especially since we are yet to test 5.13 drivers on 64 MB GeForce cards), but the wise consumer would wait and see how things pan out. Who knows, maybe in this case more will not prove to be better.