NVIDIA Geforce 2 Review

maniack writes: "NVIDIA lifted the ban on Geforce 2 benchmarks and specs at midnight, and Anandtech right away posted an article on the card. They put it up against all of its competitors, including the Viper 2, the Rage Fury MAXX, the Voodoo 4 and 5, and several flavors of the old Geforce including a 64 MB DDR card. The 32 MB DDR Geforce 2 GTS ripped the competition apart in almost every benchmark including the texture heavy Q3 Quaver. The Geforce 2 was the top performer in both high-end and low-end systems. The article also explores the performance hit cause by full scene anti-aliasing. Sharkyextreme also has a review, as does Hot Hardware. "

Comments

Oh god, the chance to first post! :)

[Eneff]

Now seriously, I do believe our obsession with video cards has been a bit extreme lately. Is it great that there are cards that blow the socks off anything out even a year before? Sure. Is it worth 300 dollars a year for an extra few FPS in Quake 3?

I'm just not sure.

Furthermore, we've come to the point that the extra rates only support more on the screen, rather than an incredible clarity. I've seen some nice pictures, but it's still light years away from anything I would call beautiful.

Yet the biggest delimiter isn't the card anymore, but the artistry. There just aren't enough artists, and it's not possible to put enough great artists on most teams to make something spectacular. That might be the next frontier. Even if we can get life-like quality, the game will still only be as good as the artist behind it.

(I wonder if I gave up the first post by now. :)

Re:Oh god, the chance to first post! :)

[Domini]

Agreed, Quake is already running at 110 fps on my PC (and don't tell me 30 fps is good enough... that has been discussed in the past)

There is the following point however... the faster 3D cards become, the more inexperienced people can bring more creative games that are actually playable to the market.

This is made possible by the recent (explaining all the latest hoo-hah about Gfx cards) introduction of on-card transform and lighting.

Quake is scaled down for speed purposes, the faster the cards become, the more complex scenes may be generated without loss of FPS.

GeForce was the first with the GPU (tm?) and although it's not fully utilized yet, it still bodes quite well.

Things like FSAA and Motion Blur may cause thing to enter the realm of 'beautiful' pretty soon.

My 2c

Re:Oh god, the chance to first post! :)

[ChadM]

My friend just got a 21 inch moniter yesterday and we loaded Q3 at 1152x864, 32bpp. it still looks killer, but the main problem with a voodoo3(which he has) is how high the res can be set to. he is currently running it on 1280x1024 but is waiting for a GeForce2(probably will buy one on its first day out) so we can run it at 1600x1200 and possibly higher if supported(yes its that big. i drooled). if i could see quake 3 and unreal tournament in 1600x1200/32bpp and full screen anti-aliasing without lag i might just have to steal his moniter. my point being that it's not necessarily about frames per second as much as supporting a higher resolution and still having enough horsepower to render the whole thing.

You know, all these new cards kick a lot of butt

[jht]

So Nvidia will be king of the hill again for now, at least until the next announcement cycle. Maybe it's me, but I think that video cards have gotten so fast that at this point even the lowest-end cards (anything more potent than the integrated video in the i810 chipset) have more than enough horesepower to handle any users' typical 3D needs (including very enjoyable gaming). Right now the money for a supreme video card is arguably better spent on tons o' RAM and an ATA-66 drive/controller combo for faster performance in everyday apps.

As for picking a video card, I'd just look for the best possible support for your OS of choice - though Nvidia's performance and support under Windows is terrific, their Linux support is awful so no matter how swank the GeForce is it's out of the running to go into my systems. I still dual-boot, but I'd rather not.

ATI and 3Dfx do a better job of supporting Windows/Linux/Mac, so I buy mainly their cards. I'm willing to trade off a few FPS playing Quake III under Windows for that Linux and Mac support. But hey, if you don't mind Windows and you live to frag, then this GeForce 2 sounds pretty darned sweet.

- -Josh Turiel

Re:Nvidia linux support

[Microlith]

They're still not playing nice. They didn't release source and the drivers don't use DRI in Xfree86 4.0

While it's nice they released drivers, they could at least follow standards.

And of course, with closed source drivers, if it crashes you can't tell why, nor can you possibly fix it.

Prices, power consumption are increasing

[Junks Jerzey]

For a while it looked like you'd be able to run out and get any good 3D video card for $79 and that would be that. Now with these newer cards we're back to the $250 and up range. Seeing as how even cards from two generations back haven't been pushed to the limit yet, this is mostly an outlet for people who want bragging rights.

The other disturbing trend is the power consumption is getting much worse. Whatever happened to the "faster, smaller, less power" mantra? The Voodoo 5, for example, needs to have a hard drive power cable plugged into it. The GeForce 2 is in the same ballpark, if not worse. Yes folks, hardware engineers can do whatever they want without limits on power consumption or price. Now how about getting back on track?

Re:Prices, power consumption are increasing

[RevRigel]

Actually, due to the move from .22u to .18u process, the GeForce2 uses half as much power as its predecessor. I've heard that NVidia will be shortly releasing the NV11 for laptops, which will use 30% less power than the GeForce2, as well. 3dfx is just going down the tubes. They did a technical seminar at my University (of Texas at Austin) two weeks ago, and had a Voodoo 5 5500 on hand. The FSAA made no noticeable difference, the speed wasn't very impressive, and they even went so far as to call the people working on Mesa 'a bunch of hippies', with no connection to OpenGL at all (i.e. they implied that it was as separate from OpenGL as Glide).

I personally have a TNT 1 card (I bought it because it was good enough, and cost $70) in my dual 500MHz system with 256MB of RAM. I get around 20fps, 8fps if anything interesting happens. Oh, yeah, that's at 512x384. I guess I need to get some time away from school to try those new drivers, but I'm seriously considering going non-NVidia if I buy another card.

Re:Prices, power consumption are increasing

[Keelor]

Okay, other posters have pointed out the fact that the Geforce 2 seems to be going the right direction (with respect to power consumption, at least). However, I'd like to take a moment to agree with you--and point out the best part. Last I heard, the Voodoo 5 6000 (the one with four VSA-100 chips) won't have " a hard drive power cable plugged into it." Nope, instead, it will just have an external 110 power supply that will plug into the back. How's that for power consumption?

~=Keelor

Another Great Review Is Up

[db_cooper]

Sharky Extreme has a great review up too, also technical in nature. I read it, and as I recall, it was about 30 pages, pretty in depth.

One of the biggest points is that current x86 cpus are not fast enough to outrun the graphics card in low res. When tested with a 1 GHZ Athlon, and an 866Mhz P3, the graphics card doesnt fare much better in low res than does the original GeForce. It is essentially a barrier for games, created by realease dates :-)

Also of note, the business practices of NVIDIA are scrutinized, such as their 6 month release intervals, which seem to be resulting in their being king of the hill rather freqently.

Supposedly, the ATI Radeon MAXX will be the only thing remotely close to the nv15 (GeForce2 GTS). However, the only thing expected to defeat the GeForce2 (NV15) will be the NV20.

For those of you who haven't had the time to read the reviews, they're going to come out with the NV15 VERY soon. Oh, and the 1 ghz athlon cant keep up with it, as mentioned. At the same time there will be 128MB versions of the original GeForce, geared towards workstations. Soon after, there will be 64mb versions of the GeForce2. Shortly after that, we will see the mobile gforce, NV11, a 3d card for laptops. 6 months from now, nvidia will introduce us to the nv20.

IMO things are shaping up very nicely in the graphics arena. We are not just seeing more frames in our games, but many additional features, thus letting people from hardcore gamers running at 640x480 in low detail, to those that desire 32bit quality and large detail wanting to realize all that our technology can bring us, be satisfied with one card, regardless of the company producing it

This should be ironic

[Keelor]

It ought to be interesting to see the 3dfx PR machine at work now. The true irony will be when they take the inevitable road of, "Sure, the Geforce GTS has a couple more FPS, but we have anti-aliasing, which improves the way games that are out now look!"

Compare this to about a year and a half ago, when the TNT came out. "Sure, they support 32-bit color and higher texture sizes, but we have more FPS! No true gamer cares about how good their games look, they just want more FPS!"

The sad thing is, I think 3dfx knew this would happen--that's why they've been pulling away from emphasizing the performance of the Voodoo 5, and instead hyping the full-screen anti-aliasing.

On a side note, it now seems that the Voodoo 4 (the single VSA-100 chip) has no hope of seeing the light of the retail market. Some OEMs _might_ pick it up, but considering that the Voodoo 5 5500, it might be a bit of an embarrassment to release the Voodoo 4.

~=Keelor

TV and Film have Motion Blur.

[raygundan]

The reason that 30fps (or lower for movies) looks acceptable is that the filming process produces motion blur. The motion blurred image is much closer to what our eyes get from reality than an every-single-frame-is-crystal-clear rendering from a video card. To produce a similar effect from a typical 3D card, you need enough more frames that your eyes can't see them all and produce the blurring on their own. (Like real life) It seems obvious that you need at least 2x the frames to get a blurring effect between them, since you have to have 2 frames to blur between.

Newer video cards ARE beginning to incorporate motion blur, which will help enormously. But it is cheaper to simply up the framerate, at least up to a certain point. (Which I don't think we have really reached) Motion blurring sounds like a very computationally intensive thing to do.

So there are reasons to go to 100fps-- if the frames are clear, it will take many more of them to approximate the effect that motion-blurred TV or film produce at 30fps.

My kingdom for good drivers!

[Taos]

I'm a 3D Animator/Programmer and a student so I find myself looking at the game cards to find which one is the best solution for my work. I can't afford the top of the line GL card that just gives me the raw crunching power I need. Therefore, fill rates and all the other bells and whistles don't phase me at all.

The one thing that is most important to me, however, is support. I don't mean telephone, but platform. I recently got burnt on buying a Viper 2000 because they refuse to make NT drivers with any sort of hardware acceleration. Then Linux runs into the same problem. I was sold by their web site when I was deciding on the card for my new computer. Their web site turns out to be a flat out lie. And if there's one S3 developer out there reading this, I have a size 12 boot that has your name all over it.

So now I'm incredibly leary of these game cards coming out with all these whiz bang features but will probably only develop for WinBlows 2000. I need drivers for NT4 because that's where the software is these days, and I need Linux drivers because that is where the graphics software is going and where I create most of my custom software. So when a company now comes out saying they're going to support this and that, but don't have the drivers to back it up, I'm just going to wait.

This summer, I will probably just buy a GeForce I. Because now they have released the drivers for it under Linux (it isn't open source but I don't really care) and they've always had stellar NT support. I know people here like their drivers open source and their cards to be screaming fast, but I just want one that works as advertised and fits into my meager budget.

Taos

Fix the damn drivers... SMP is still unstable

[Malc]

I have a Leadtek GeForce DDR in my dual P2 450 machine. I upgraded it to two processors in February at which time Win NT started locking up several times a day. I recently upgraded the graphics drivers to version 3.72, and that seems to have saved NT. However, Quake 3 (when played in SMP mode) crashes (and sometimes locks up my machine) - I would guess the MTBF (mean time between failure) is about five minutes for Q3 with "r_smp 1".

On top of that, Leadtek won't supply the Control Panel display settings stuff for NT that they have under Win98, so my gamma settings are too low (better than under Linux though where 3D games are unusable due to the darkness).

Come on guys, fix the drivers. The fastest card in the world isn't much good if I can't use it.