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Articles: VideoNVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Reference Graphics Card ReviewCategory: Video by FastSite [ 05/10/2000 | 12:00 AM ] The so long-awaited review of a new NVIDIA offering is finally up. We tested a reference graphics card, whichproved the most powerful piece for now. The curtain of mystery is lifted: no more speculations! Table of contents:
The time of new graphics chipsets has finally come and the heroes of numerous rumors start cropping up in the market. And if3dfx never made a secret of its Voodoo5 and we already knew quite a lot about it in autumn of 1999, NVIDIA NV15 was rumored allover but nothing definite was brought to light. The rumors were so diverse that we were really at a loss: starting from the ideathat NV15 would be just an enhanced GeForce256 working at higher frequencies and finishing with a supposition about a completelynew architecture. So, on 26 April 2000 NVIDIA at last announced its new graphics accelerator. Please, meet GeForce2 GTS!
We have already expressed our supposition that NVIDIA would keep the name "GeForce" for its newcomer. Yes, this name is relativelynew, but it has already become pretty popular that's why it could be just silly to give it up. In fact, this situation may at firststrike you as very familiar: remember the case of NVIDIA Riva TNT2, which got a "2" in its name, like GeForce2 GTS, and whichappeared just an overclocked version of NVIDIA Riva TNT (with some enhancements though). But this time the things are completelydifferent: NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS is an absolutely new chipset, though it has inherited quite a lot from its predecessor. It is notfor nothing that its name includes "GTS", which should be read as GigaTexel Shading. It reflects the chip's huge fillratepotential and at the same times declares the implementation of NVIDIA's new Shading Rasterizer technology. Now let's talka bit more about this new product and its peculiarities. Specification
 3D Graphics:
Video
If you are looking for more details on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS chipset, we have already discussed them in our recentanalytical article, so now we will just briefly mention the main chipset parameters. The major distinguishing feature of the new GPU, which makes it different from its competitors is four renderingpipelines with two texture processors each. Due to this peculiarity GeForce2 GTS is just invincible in games supportingmultitexturing, because its performance grows unbelievably high. Some time ago we mentioned that 3dfx chipsets (Voodoo2,Voodoo3) acquired "free" multitexturing when the second TMU got involved. So, the texturing rate almost doubled while thepixel processing rate remained the same. Besides, it could be also possible to lay one texture and to carry out tri-linearfiltering, for instance, within one single clock. NVIDIA chipsets were deprived of this feature because they had only oneTMU on each pipeline. With multitexturing enabled, the pipelines united and worked together on each pixel that's why thepixels were processed almost twice as slowly. As for NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, this mode provides the already mentioned "free"multitexturing. Without multitexturing support this chipset will look just like an ordinary NVIDIA GeForce256 in games,which also processes four pixels per clock laying one texture over each pixel. However, you shouldn't think that NVIDIA GeForce2GTS will show the same performance as GeForce256 in this case. Just look at the fillrate! If NVIDIA GeForce256 shows 480 millionpixels per second, then NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS can boast 800 million. That's why the latter will prove much faster in any games,and particularly in games supporting multitexturing where NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS will be far ahead of all the others. It isespecially important bearing in mind that almost all the games already support multitexturing. Tri-linear filtering support is another cool feature, which appeared already by NVIDIA GeForce256. Certainly, the qualityof anisotropic filtering by GeForce2 GTS has been also significantly improved due to the use of 16 texture samples instead of8 samples as by its predecessor. NVIDIA Shading RasterizerThe main tidbit of the new chipset appeared a totally new unit: NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR). As we have alreadymentioned above, NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS chipset is optimized for multitexturing, in other words it should be able to laymore than one texture over one pixel per clock effecting various texture blending operations. In the beginning theorder and the type of blending used to be set quite definitely and the game developer couldn't interfere with thisprocess. However, from now on DirectX 8.0 will also include Pixel Shader API, which will allow setting a formula formultitexturing effects.
This examples give you an idea of various effects and operations connected with colors obtained after the lightingcalculation was over (D), with base texture laying (T) and reflections (R). Note that all calculations are made for each pixel of a polygon (triangle) that is why the result is much more precise,we don't see any artifacts and in the end get a really beautiful high quality graphics. Pixel Shader and NSR are seriously changing the entire multitexturing concept therefore those game developers who wishto use new technologies will be forced to work out a new multitexturing module. And of course, this will tell on the launchingdates of the games making use of all these innovations. To be fair, we should admit that this technology will make the realizationof Environmental Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) pretty easy. And of course, we can't leave out super high image quality we can obtainwith NSR:
Environmental Mapped Bump MappingSpeaking about EMBM we would like to say that this effect has been long connected with Matrox G400 chipset,which supported hardware EMBM. In our G400 review we have already found out that EMBM is the best of all kindsof bump mapping. That's why it is a great advantage of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS that it supports this technology.
On the left you can see a screenshot with Bump Mapping, and on the right - a screenshotwithout it. Both screenshots are made from Isle of Morg gaming demo by Experience. This demo supports all thenewest functions of NVIDIA chipsets. Cubic Environment MappingAs you can understand from the chipset's characteristics, NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS supports Cubic Environment Mapping:
This effect helps us to make the reflections of the surrounding objects look much more realistic. Well, you have probably understood already that modern graphics accelerators are very rich in various features.Besides, if we also take into account the computing capacity of the T&L module, which serves to reduce the CPU workloadin terms of image processing, then we will have every right to ask: why on earth are we still playing those faded gameswith the stupid monsters? We really wish the developers released games with a brilliant graphics as rich as the graphicswe see in the technological demos provided by the chip designers. No doubt, it s much easier to follow the already existingway using 8bit textures of 256x256… Actually, some features of the today's graphics cards appear absolutely undemanded becausemost developers simply ignore them. Well, enough for NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS chipset peculiarities. Let's pass over to the graphics card built on this chip. Closer Look
The card we had at our disposal was an NVIDIA test sample or a reference card. The manufacturers will base their cards on thisdesign that's why their end-products shouldn't be too different from the reference. The card is made on AGP 2x/4x interface, has32MB DDR SGRAM located in 8 chips on both sides of the PCB. The microchips are made by Infineon and feature 6ns access time.
If we take a closer look at the card, we will notice that it is equipped with a TV-out. However, the entire circuitry as wellas BT869 microchip responsible for this function is located on the daughter card.
There is an already familiar active cooler stuck to the chipset with a fan pressed to the heatsink. The chip doesn't heatas much as NVIDIA GeForce256 that's why we hope it will turn up to our expectations during overclocking. Installation and DriversThe graphics card was accompanied by NVIDIA reference drivers version 5.16, which properties pages hardly differ from theprevious driver versions discussed in some of our reviews. We managed to figure out two major differences, which are worth ourattention. They deal with NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS support.  In Direct3D section of this properties page we can see Anti-Aliasing (AA - edges smoothing effect) settings. When you work atlower resolutions in 3D graphics, the problem of "stepping" edges may be the problem No 1, because it spoils the entire 3D picture.When NVIDIA Riva TNT chipsets first came out, they introduced anti-aliasing support via oversampling, i.e. rendering at a twicehigher resolution than the set one. And then the image was resized to a smaller one, which helped to eliminate all those "steps"along the object's edges. However, the card will, of course, perform much worse with these settings (imagine, that for a 800x6003D scene the card should first process the whole image at 1600x1200). This lag explains why they have removed anti-aliasing fromthe previous driver versions. According to NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS specifications, this chipset supports Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). The screenshot showsseven types of anti-aliasing starting from the simplest one (the slider goes to the left) and finishing with the most complex one(the slider goes to the right). Unfortunately, this driver version supports only one type of FSAA: when during oversampling thesubpixels are chosen according to 2x2 mask (which means that the final colors of the objects' borders are defined with the helpof two selected subpixels in the horizontal and two - in the vertical direction). NVIDIA promises to introduce new driver versionswith FSAA pretty soon. Besides, we would also like to note that far not all the games support FSAA. One of the today's gamessupporting it is Expendable, for instance.  Here we can enable FSAA in OpenGL but again only one single type: 2x2 mask. NVIDIA also promises flexible setting of FSAAtypes in OpenGL. Note that S3TC technology is supported in these drivers by default that is why you can disable it only with the followingparameter: r_ext_compress_textures. As for Direct3D, its DXTC technology is used only if the applications support it. We would like to particularly dwell on one more important issue: AGP texturing in OpenGL. This topic has been a really hotpoint for discussion for a long time already, and everybody had to admit that NVIDIA drivers didn't support DiME in OpenGL,i.e. texture processing in the PC system memory instead of using RAM as a buffer for storing textures. As a result, even themost powerful graphics cards such as Creative 3D Blaster GeForce256 Annihilator Pro showed tangible performance drops in "hard"tests, like Quake3 Quaver (on q3dm9 level with the maximum amount of textures):  Look at a sharp performance drop in 32bit color. This test is full of larger textures, about 512x512, which total size isgreater than the available local graphics memory. That is why the requirements to AGP texturing are more than acute. And whatdo we see? One of the most powerful accelerators simply loses its advantageous position without DiME in 3.68 driver version. Then let's find out what happened after we had installed driver ver. 5.16. Well, it seems to us that there is hardly anyneed in commenting on that. We are glad to announce that AGP support has finally started working to the full extent.Unfortunately, we can't guarantee that DiME will work perfectly with NVIDIA Riva TNT/TNT2 chipsets, because we have neverchecked that out. PerformanceBefore starting our discussion of the testing results, let us introduce our testsystems first. Test platform built on Intel Pentium III:
Test platform built on AMD Athlon:
Both test platforms work under Windows 98 SE. On both of them we used ViewSonic P810 (21") and NOKIA447Xav (17"). We would like to remind you that all the tests were run with ver. 5.16 drivers with Vsync disabled (monitor refreshrate synchronization with RAMDAC frequency). For a more illustrative comparison we also tested Creative 3D BlasterGeForce256 Annihilator Pro graphics card equipped with DDR memory. As usual, we would like to start with 2D graphics. To test the performance of our graphics cards in 2D we usedWinBench99, namely Graphics Marks. At the resolution set to 1600x1200 in 32bit color we got the following results:
As we see, both cards performed similarly. In fact, we had expected something like that to happen, because itdoesn't make any sense to further increase the performance of the gaming graphics card in 2D. So, all the latestgraphics cards prove almost equally efficient in 2D, which is enough for any user. And as for the 2D graphics quality, there are a few things worth pointing out here. We do realize the risk ofarousing general reproach of all Matrox fans, but we will still make bold to state that in terms of 2D image qualityNVIDIA GeForce2 GTS managed to catch up with Matrox G400 at higher resolutions as well. Although we were pretty muchsatisfied with the 2D quality provided by NVIDIA GeForce256 based cards, the picture shown by GeForce2 GTS based cardwas beyond any competition. Of course, we should also take into account that the piece we had was just a test sample ofNVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based graphics card that's why the graphics cards from other manufacturers built on the same chipsetcan provide different 2D image quality. How did they manage this incredible 2D? RAMDAC works at the same 350MHz as NVIDIA GeForce256, but the difference is stillvery tangible. In our first NVIDIA NV15 Preview we mentioned that this chipset had a totally new RAMDAC, which is not integratedinto the GPU core although it is placed into the same package with the chipset. This is very likely to be one of the reasons ofits success in 2D. However, we think that there is one more reason: the TV-out circuits location, which is moved from the PCB tothe daughter card. And now it's really high time we passed over to 3D graphics performance. We will not only check the fastness of NVIDIA GeForce2GTS based card, but also its performance with FSAA enabled as well as S3TC support. We used the following software tools for our investigation:
Quake3 ArenaThe tests were run in two modes: Fast (16bit color) and High Quality (32bit color). The diagram below reflects theperformance in Pentium III based platform (including the performance with S3TC support and FSAA enabled):   As you can see, in 16bit color NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS dashed forward and left its competitor behind at higher resolutions.Enabling S3TC (set r_ext_compress_textures equal to 1) doesn't change the situation, while FSAA makes all the resolutionsover 800x600 absolutely unsuitable for gaming. And in 32bit color it is simply impossible to play with FSAA enabled at all.The performance drop is immense. However, we don't see any particular need in FSAA in this case, because even at 1280x1024the game runs quite well and at resolutions higher than 1024x768 FSAA effect appears absolutely unnoticeable. In 32bit colorwe should point out a smaller performance gain compared to NVIDIA GeForce256 based card with DDR memory. Stop! Don't you have thefeeling that you have already experienced the same thing? As for us, we immediately recalled a story of NVIDIA GeForce256 basedcard with SDR memory, when the memory turned out the accelerator's worst bottleneck. To our great disappointment the storyrepeats... Here are the results for Athlon based platform:   The picture is very similar: in 16bit color our hero manages to surpass its competitor a bit more than in 32bit color. The next test is aimed at checking the graphics accelerator's capability of operating larger textures without S3TC, sothat to see their performance in case of intensive AGP-texturing. All the tests were run with quaver demo and the Detailslider was set to its maximum:   Here we are happy to announce good gaming performance of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based card at 1024x768x32, and as for 16bitcolor, it proved perfect everywhere!   And on the platform with AMD Athlon the results appeared even better. All the recent positive response about the improvedNVIDIA drivers was not ungrounded: AGP texturing of most graphics cards on mainboards with AMD750 chipset started improving.And now we've got another evidence. Some time ago http://www.dmmunderground.com/ put up a few additional Quake3 levels using S3TC technology and containingbeautifully created huge textures, so that S3 Savage2000 owners took great pride in their excellent graphics. Today even thegraphics cards on NVIDIA chipsets acquired S3TC support in OpenGL due to a cross-license agreement between NVIDIA and S3. That is why with the help of Annihilator demo-benchmark (dmmq3dm6 level) we get the chance to estimate the performance ofNVIDIA GeForce2 GTS with fully fledged S3TC.   We can state that this case is nearly the same as the previous one: the performance is just great in 32bit color at 1024x768and not bad at all at 1280x1024. As for 16bit color, the performance is perfect at all resolutions.   The results ratio is practically the same, though the absolute figures are a bit higher, which means perfect gaming performanceat 1280x1024x32. So, summing up our observations concerning NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS's performance in Quake3 we can conclude that FSAA proved a totalfiasco. Of course, we do understand that it is the hardest mode for the graphics card to work in, however, you will be able toplay with FSAA only at the lowest possible resolutions. Frankly speaking, it is not the cause to tear your hair, because thecard's performance at higher resolutions easily makes up for this drawback. And a relatively low performance gain compared toNVIDIA GeForce256 DDR in 32bit color mode is a clear evidence of DDR memory bandwidth shortage of GeForce2 GTS. ExpendableThis game will show the card's performance in Direct3D, also with FSAA enabled. Besides, we will look at NVIDIA GeForce2 GTSscalability, i.e. the dependence of the card's performance on the CPU frequency.   As you can see, the gaming performance is very high, and almost always is restricted by the CPU working frequency (except1600x1200, when the difference between our GeForce2 GTS and NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR is considerably large). In both cases FSAA enabling causes almost twofold performance drop. Note that at resolutions over 800x600 FSAA is blockedby the drivers and doesn't work at all. We would like to remind you once again that in the today's latest drivers version5.16 FSAA follows a very complicated scheme that is why it can be really used only in games, which recognize this function.As a result, there is no way you can see FSAA at work in most Direct3D games.   And in 32bit color the things change. At the resolutions up to 1024x768 (including) the CPU performance once again turnsa deadlock for the graphics card, however, further on the gap between NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR and NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS getssignificantly smaller than in 16bit color. Although you will get acceptable gaming performance up to 1600x1200x32. And now let's take a look at the card's scalability.   The performance of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS greatly depends on the CPU frequency, although the results shown on Pentium III550MHz are quite fine. Summing up the results of our Expendable tests we would like to say that even 733MHz processors are sometimes too slowfor the card to show its best in 16bit color (except 1600x1200). Small performance gain in 32bit color again points outthat the memory bandwidth is insufficient. As for FSAA, we decided to refrain from drawing any conclusions before thedrivers support it appropriately, because currently it is absolutely impossible to find the most optimal dependence ofthe FSAA quality and the performance drop occurring in case FSAA is enabled. Unreal TournamentFrankly speaking, we didn't feel like including this test in our study of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS performance for two reasons.First, the performance in this game depends too much on the CPU frequency. Second, this gaming engine is optimized initially forGlide, which is not the best thing for Direct3D graphics cards. However, then we decided not to neglect this test, because thegame is pretty popular and besides, 3dfx is about to launch new graphics accelerators. So, let's get started.   Well, the diagrams show that the difference from NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR is tangible only at higher resolutions. In 32bit colorthe gaming performance is very high up to 1024x768 including, and in 16bit color you can enjoy playing this game even at 1600x1200.We would like to stress that this game is designed so that unlike Quake3 for instance, you don't really notice the 32bit color.Therefore, you can play even in 16bit color without any serious quality worsening. GroveThis test demonstrates the work of Hardware TCL (T&L) unit. It means that the geometric coprocessor is responsiblefor the coordinates transformation, lighting calculations and clipping (deletion of invisible parts). NVIDIA has recentlylaunched a new version of its TreeMark test, which is now known as Grove. The new version allows setting more than one tree(up to 10) and watching the graphics accelerator perform in extreme conditions. The tests were carried out with default settings (tree 1, depth 5, lights 4):  As you can see, GeForce2 GTS GPU is much more powerful than the previous one of GeForce256 DDR. The graph below shows the dependence of the GPU performance on the scene complexity (amount of polygons):  This graph of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS is almost of the same shape as that of GeForce256 DDR but the results are much better. And the next graph shows the dependence of the GPU performance on the amount of lights:  Again the curves are similar by NVIDIA GeForce256 and NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, and again a new chipset proved much better. We wouldlike to point out that although Hardware T&L of the new chipset allows setting more lights, the performance drop won't be too greatto harm the gameability. So, we can conclude that NVIDIA kept their promise when they said that a new GPU would be more powerful than its predecessor.NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS really turned out cooler, although in very complex scenes (over 120,000 polygons) the performance wasrelatively low and hardly differed a lot from that of NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR. Summing up the results of our performance analysis for NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, we would like to state the following:
3D Graphics QualityFirst of all, we would like to take a look at the visual advantages of FSAA. The first screenshots were madewith FSAA disabled:
And now the screenshots with FSAA on:
The anti-aliasing effect can't remain unnoticed, though there is still room for improvement (a shot on the right).There are a few rough edges left. Of course, if FSAA keeps causing incredible performance reduction like that and still provides far not impeccable imagequality, it will turn out absolutely useless. To be fair we have to say that the performance of GeForce2 GTS allows playingat high resolutions where FSAA is almost unnecessary. As for the general impression made by the quality of 3D graphics we were nearly struck dumb with admiration! Fully fledgedtri-linear filtering, anisotropic filtering, full S3TC support, which creates beautiful scenes with high level of detail:  On the threshold of GeForce2 GTS launching NVIDIA released a special Quake3 level called NVIDIA Bunker, which uses largetextures and various effects increasing the accelerator workload. With the highest graphics detail this level can be runonly on such a powerful graphics accelerator as NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS:
ExtrasSince DVD disks are so widely spread today, you should be also interested in DVD support by new graphics cards. We have already mentioned that NVIDIA GeForce256 chipsets support Motion Compensation during MPEG2-stream decoding.The most widely spread software player, which works fine with this chipset is InterVideo WinDVD 2000. We would adviseyou to download DVD Genie utility for DVD-players complex setting, which supports NVIDIA GeForce256. As for the newNVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, these programs do not know it yet, however, we are sure that the corresponding support will beintroduced in the near future. Nevertheless, with all the functions optimized for NVIDIA GeForce256, the pictureobtained on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS was also of excellent quality:  And the CPU utilization was only 18-22%! Fantastic result! ConclusionsThe graphics accelerator launched by NVIDIA is the most powerful one today; it features the whole bunch ofadvantages and valuable peculiarities. However, we can't leave out its serious drawback: slow 166MHz DDR memory,which serves as a brake for the entire graphics subsystem. In fact, we may hope to see new NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS withfaster memory, but now we cannot promise anything definite. And in the meanwhile we can state that in 32bit color modethis card hardly managed to make a significant break-through compared to GeForce256 DDR. Nevertheless, the performancegain is undeniable and quite tangible, actually. Of course, the gaming performance has also risen: you may even feel athome at 1280x1024x32 in some cases. As for Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing, NVIDIA made a blunder here. We don't want to discuss all the details of this failurehoping that NVIDIA will keep its word and improve the situation in the next driver version. When we will review massgraphics pieces made on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS we will return to this problem. However, we have to admit that today'sFSAA may be regarded as total absence of this function, because it will hardly be a worthy thing with the performancereduction it causes (except the resolution equal to 640x480). Among the major advantages of this chipset we have to mention S3TC support. And we should once again point out beautiful2D quality provided by the new product. Unfortunately, the graphics cards based on this chipset are rumored to be quite expensive. That is why we would recommendthem only if you were going to decide on NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR cards. If you are planning to upgrade your card based on aslower chipset, then you'd better wait a bit for the prices to get slightly down and for 3dfx cards (Voodoo5 5000 andVoodoo5 5500) to be launched. Though they are still unknown to us, they may turn out quite worth the waiting. Highs:
Lows:
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Category NewsCategory: Video Friday, July 4, 20083:08 pm Nvidia Plans Further Price-Cuts for Latest Graphics Cards. Nvidia Intends to Drop Price of GeForce GTX 200-Series Graphics Cards Thursday, July 3, 20089:27 pm Transition to 16:9 PC Monitor Panels Inevitable – Research Firm. 16:9 Panels to Replace 16:10 Panels, Says Research Firm 4:07 pm Nvidia Lowers Sales Guidance amid Chipset Flaws and Decreasing Prices of Graphics Chips. Nvidia Issues Warning Following Issues with Chipsets, Graphics Processors Tuesday, July 1, 20081:46 pm Diamond Multimedia Preps Über-Overclocked ATI Radeon HD 4870 Graphics Card. ATI, Diamond Bid on Overclocked ATI Radeon HD 4870 to Crash Nvidia’s GeForce 200 GTX Monday, June 30, 20084:32 pm AMD Returns ATI All-In-Wonder Graphics Cards to Market. AMD Unveils ATI All-In-Wonder HD Graphics Card All Latest News <%BANNER[right_130x130_1]%>
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As you can notice from the photo: the memory type is exactly the same as on NVIDIA GeForce256 based cards with DDR memory.However, here it works at its nominal frequency of 166MHz (makes 333MHz measured with SDR-memory standards). Moreover, we have everyreason to suppose that a 16MHz increase in memory frequency (compared to NVIDIA GeForce256 based graphics cards with DDR memory150MHz) won't ensure the required performance gain. This memory is not powerful enough for the chipset that's why we are alittle bit concerned because we may face the situation with NVIDIA GeForce256 based graphics cards with SDR memory once againand for them memory bandwidth was the greatest bottleneck.
We have already seen the same TV-Out on ATI's graphics cards (RAGE FURY). This solution implies that the PCB should be equippedwith a universal connector for various daughter cards with a TV-Out, TV-In or TV-In/Out on board. This will allow the graphics cardmanufacturers to design different versions of their products without any reference design modifications. They will be able to turntheir card even into a multimedia combo! So, this may positively tell on the image quality, because a TV-Out circuit on thegraphics card is known to be slightly spoiling the picture on your monitor.
