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By
Dave Altavilla
5/24/2001
Before we get into the
numbers, please take a look at our systems specs.
There are significant variances across the net with
respect to published benchmark scores for the
GeForce3. System configurations do make a big
difference. In
Marco's Gigabyte GF3000
review, he used a Pentium III based system for
testing. Here with the Visiontek GeForce3,
we'll use a Pentium 4. Between these two
articles you should also get a good idea of how the
GeForce3 scales with processor speed.
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Hot Hardware's Pentium 4 Test System |
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1.5GHz. of fun |
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-
Visiontek GeForce3 64MB AGP Graphics Card
-
nVidia GeForce2 Ultra 64MB AGP Graphics Card
- Intel Pentium 4
1.5GHz. Processor
- Abit TH7-RAID
Pentium 4 Motherboard
- 256MB of Samsung
PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM,
- Thermaltake Indigo
Orb P4 CPU Cooler -
Thanks Plycon!
- IBM DTLA307030
30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
- Sound Blaster Live
Sound Card,
- Kenwood True-X 72X
CD
- WindowsME
- Direct X 8.0 and
nVidia reference drivers version 11.01
- Intel chipset
drivers version 2.80
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GeForce2 Ultra
Versus GeForce3 |
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DX8 and Quake 3 Tests |
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We'll
start off with our usual round of 3DMark 2001
testing. First, we would like to show
you some of the new DirectX 8 features that are now
supported in this benchmark, that the GeForce3 can
handle in hardware.
Here you
see the use of Environment Bump Mapping, Vertex and
Pixel Shaders, all of which are only currently
supported by the GeForce3.
Visiontek GeForce3 No AA
GeForce2 Ultra No AA
You'll
also notice that the GeForce3 has one more test
score at every resolution versus the GeForce2 UItra,
that being "Pure Hardware T&L". The
GeForce2 Ultra doesn't support it, so each of those
tests failed in its batch run.
Here's what the folks at MadOnion say about this new
DX8 supported T&L feature:
"DX8 introduced a new
rendering pipeline, the Pure Hardware T&L (PureHAL,
Pure Hardware Abstraction Layer). This pipeline
places higher demands on the graphics card, but is
faster than the Hardware T&L (HAL) pipeline."
There
you have it, fairly straight forward. As you
can see, PureHAL mode is slightly faster for the
GeForce3 in every test. Overall, the GeForce3
crushes its older generation sibling, at every
resolution. Let's look at a couple of
resolutions with AA enabled.
Visiontek GeForce3 4X AA
GeForce2 Ultra 4X AA
The
GeForce3 once again dominates. We'll look more
into Anti-Ailiasing in our Q3 tests.
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Quake 3, More FSAA,
Overclocking Aquanox and Dronez Testing |
