NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS

by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 26, 2000 12:00 PM EST

The Test

We chose three systems to measure the performance of these video cards.  Remember that this is a comparison of the performance of video cards, not of CPUs or motherboard platforms.

For our High End testing platform, we picked an Athlon 750 running on a KX133 motherboard.  The Athlon 750 is fast enough that it won’t be a limiting factor in the benchmarks and should also provide a good estimate of how all of the cards compared would perform on a 600 – 800MHz Athlon or Pentium III system (it will at least tell you which card would be faster).

For our Low End testing platform we picked a Pentium III 550E running on a BX motherboard.  Although this isn’t a very “low-end” processor, it is fast enough  to see a performance difference between video cards without the processor stepping in as a huge limitation.  If we used something like a Celeron 466, the performance of virtually all the cards would be virtually identical at the lower resolutions because the CPU and FSB/memory buses are limiting factors.  Once again, this is a test of graphics cards not of CPU/platform performance. 

For our FSAA testing, we picked a 1GHz Pentium III running on an i820 motherboard with RDRAM.  The reason we picked this platform (we are aware that it isn’t widely available) is because it eliminates virtually all bottlenecks that would be present and allows us to illustrate the biggest performance hit enabling FSAA would result in.  Slower setups would have lesser performance hits because they have more bottlenecks. 

Windows 98 SE Test System

Hardware

CPU(s)

Intel Pentium III 550E

Intel Pentium III 1.0EB
AMD Athlon 750
Motherboard(s) ABIT BE6 AOpen AX6C ASUS K7V-RM
Memory

128MB PC133 Corsair SDRAM

128MB PC800 Samsung RDRAM
128MB PC133 Corsair SDRAM
Hard Drive

IBM Deskstar DPTA-372050 20.5GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA 66

CDROM

Phillips 48X

Video Card(s)

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP 64MB
3dfx Voodoo5 4500 AGP 32MB
3dfx Voodoo3 3000 AGP 16MB

ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB

ATI Rage Fury MAXX 64MB

Matrox Millennium G400MAX 32MB (would not run on Athlon platform)

NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR (default clock - 200/166 DDR)
NVIDIA GeForce 256 64MB DDR (default clock - 120/150 DDR)
NVIDIA GeForce 256 32MB DDR (default clock - 120/150 DDR)
NVIDIA GeForce 256 32MB SDR (default clock - 120/166)

NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra 32MB (default clock - 150/183)

S3 Diamond Viper II 32MB

Ethernet

Linksys LNE100TX 100Mbit PCI Ethernet Adapter

Software

Operating System

Windows 98 SE

Video Drivers

3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP 64MB - beta drivers v1.00.00
3dfx Voodoo5 4500 AGP 32MB - beta drivers v1.00.00
3dfx Voodoo3 3000 AGP 16MB
- beta drivers v1.04.07

ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB - 6.31CD25

ATI Rage Fury MAXX 64MB - A6.32CD48

Matrox Millennium G400MAX 32MB - 5.52.015

NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB DDR (default clock - 200/166 DDR) - Detonator 5.16
NVIDIA GeForce 256 64MB DDR (default clock - 120/150 DDR) - Detonator 5.16
NVIDIA GeForce 256 32MB DDR (default clock - 120/150 DDR) - Detonator 5.16
NVIDIA GeForce 256 32MB SDR (default clock - 120/166) - Detonator 5.16

NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra 32MB (default clock - 150/183) - Detonator 5.16

S3 Diamond Viper II 32MB - 4.12.01.9002-9.10.30

Benchmarking Applications

Gaming

GT Interactive Unreal Tournament 4.04 AnandTech.dem
idSoftware Quake III Arena demo001.dm3
idSoftware Quake III Arena quaver.dm3

Benchmarking the card Quake III Arena - Athlon 750
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