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OFFICIAL Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS Preview (Page 4/8)


Posted: April 26, 2000
Written by: Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy

Benchmarks - P2 450 MHz

Since the GeForce 256's T&L was supposed to make a slower CPU perform like a champ, the first GeForce 2 GTS benchmarks were to be done on a P2 450 MHz system. Here are the specs:

Pentium II 450 MHz CPU
128 MB PC100 SDRAM
Abit BX6 motherboard
Sound Blaster Live! sound card
Nvidia 5.16 reference drivers
Vsync disabled for all tests

Quake3 was the only benchmark available at the time of testing that was going to provide this card with a challenge and provide accurate results, so demo 1 was run at two resolutions: 1024x768 and 1600x1200. Anything lower than these resolutions is not even worth benchmarking with this card because the frame rates were too high to really even consider.
Note about modes used to test:
-"Normal" mode is Quake3's normal setting if enabled in the system settings. The resolution was adjusted and color depth was set to 16-bit.
-"Very High 16-bit" is the result of setting the game to "High Quality", then putting texture quality and geometric detail all the way up. Texture quality was left at 32-bit, but for this test, color depth was set to 16-bit.
-"Very High 32-bit" is the result of setting the game to "High Quality", then putting texture quality and geometric detail all the way up.



The 1024x768 benchmarks don't reveal much. The GeForce 2 GTS barely beats the GeForce 256 (7% with Very High 16-bit, 9% with normal, yet 17% with Very High 32-bit). Is this CPU limited at 1024x768? Maybe... wait until you read the benchmarks on the next page. But now, onto the higher resolution...



At 1600x1200, the GeForce 2 GTS easily takes the GeForce to the ground. ~50 FPS at 1600x1200 with only a P2 450 is quite remarkable, especially in the Very High 16-bit test. The game was very playable and there were no major slowdowns. However, look at 32-bit. As you can probably guess by this point, the 32 MB frame buffer on the GeForce 2 GTS simply is not enough to run 1600x1200x32bpp with Quake 3. The card runs out of memory and is forced to swap. This is very obvious when you run demos and see the gibs! Enabling texture compression made a slight difference in frame rate, but I did not have time to update the benchmarks. Performance increase over the GeForce 256 were 61% normal, 62% Very High 16-bit, and ~34% with Very High 32-bit. With a 64 MB frame buffer, you can probably imagine the frame rate would be quite a bit higher. Now... if only Nvidia had sent me a 64 MB card...

Notably, however, Unreal Tournament ran fine with 1600x900x32bpp, so long as texture compression was enabled. Without it, the same problems occurred as in Quake3 without texture compression. Lagged input and poor frame rates due to the lack of memory. So if you've got a slower CPU (P2 450ish), keep in mind that the GeForce 2 GTS will perform very well, even at 1600x1200. If you enable 32-bit rendering at this resolution with only a 32 MB card, you're going to have problems unless you've got texture compression enabled.

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