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NVIDIA Geforce 2 Review

Posted by Hemos on from the more-fun-with-to-be-had-with-q3a dept.

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. "

2 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. You know, all these new cards kick a lot of butt by jht · · Score: 5

    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."
  2. Re:Prices, power consumption are increasing by RevRigel · · Score: 5

    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.