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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. "
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
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
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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.
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