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GeForce3 Titanium Reviews
Paladin128 sent us
Tom's and Anandtech's respective reviews of the new NVIDIA GeForce3 Titanium series.
DX8.1 compatibility (What is that anyway?), Shadow Buffers, 3D Textures, assorted other stuffs.
Hey, but why is everything 'Titanium' now anyway? Laptops. Batteries. Video cards. I wonder if I can get titanium plating.
To answer your question:
Titanium implies that it's strong and modern. Titanium is stronger than steel, yet roughly half the weight.
It's all about the marketing. There's even Titanium credit cards, too.
I like fire ants. They are very spicy!
If you read the reviews, your card is still top of the line. The only faster is the ti500 or whatever, which is 5-7% faster. Don't get upset... they're just repackaging the same card. Why innovate, when you can market it?
Now I LOVE my video card, and it runs every game i want to as quickly as i want, so I won't be getting this anytime soon... I'd rather skip several cards and spend the money on a cool trip or a cruise. If everyone would resist the temptation to have the latest and greatest, then maybe they wouldn't release new stuff every other day. Then maybe that $600 card you just bought would be obsolete in a month. I know this will never happen, so i guess i'm just talking to a wall again...
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
As you all will notice once you read Toms interesting review there is not much new in the Titanium version of Geforce3 except a better price/performance ratio. All the added functionality is already available in current GeForce3 boards once you download the new driver.
Maybe now I will buy a Geforce3 TI200 instead of the Geforce2 Pro that I was planning on.
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Keep your hats on. It's only money.
all you need to do is overclock the memory and processor core a little bit. Should be fairly easy to do, and with very little risk. Check out VoodooFiles for some custom detonator drivers, or for overclocking utilities.
"Basically, NVIDIA's drivers cannot be open sourced. They contain several components which are licensed technology, and we have no rights to share that source code with anyone. We do not even provide source code to OpenGL or our kernel module to our board customers"
seems like a reasonable explanation to me. (Interview from theDukeofURL.org.
It's hardware is better, but the drivers are restricting it from performing to its potential. Once that is worked out, it will outperform the Geforce3 ti 500.
Sure it will...Seriously that particular sales technique of "oh it's just the drivers, but once they're sorted out it'll kick ass!" is absolute rubbish and should be treated as such. ATI has a horrendous reputation for drivers and it is, IMHO, a very deserved reputation: I'm certainly not going to buy anything on the premise that THAT company is going to improve their drivers. Another "funny" thing they do is orphaning products frequently: "Oh you want drivers for Windows XP? Sorry, you'll have to upgrade to our new product line." nvidia has set new standards in continuing to upgrade and improve drivers for long existing products and I give them great accolades for that.
So in closing ATIs theoretical performance means absolutely nothing if it isn't delivered and in the public's hands (what was that S3 card with fantastic T&L that never actually had drivers delivered that enabled it? Yet there were S3 pimps out there talking up the hypotheticals fo this super duper T&L engine). The fact that AnandTech pimped the 8500 using the driver excuse on page after page after page was absolutely despicable.
As a contrast, nvidia stays quiet about drivers and delivers what they deliver despite the fact that they actually do improve performance with each driver release. Hell someone with a GeForce 1 is still reaping performance improvements upgrading to the new Detonator XP drivers.