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ASUS AGP-V7700 Review

This is another graphics card on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS GPU. The remarkable thing about this card is a unique SmartDoctorTechnology. Besides, the card is pretty overclockable. In this review we have also touched upon the realization of FSAA onGeForce2 GTS.

by FastSite
06/08/2000 | 12:00 AM

ASUS hardly needs to be presented to the audience. This is a very well-known brand and even small children are familiar with the mainboards by this company. However, mainboards are not the only product that sells under ASUS brand name. The list of ASUS products includes graphics cards, CD ROM drives, notebooks, cable modems, etc. Today we will discuss a new family of graphics accelerators based on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS GPU. <%BANNER[article]%>

The users are already used to the graphics cards from ASUS marked as AGP-V****. These graphics cards can be distinguished not only by their high quality and nice enclosed "extras" but also by the company's unique inventions, which offer the users more flexibility when setting their graphics accelerator. We would also like to point out that ASUS has usually launched the whole family of graphics cards based on one and the same graphics processor. The difference between the graphics cards from the same family lies in the size of the local graphics memory and presence/absence of such options as TV-in/out and stereo glasses support. No doubt that all sorts of users really appreciate this move, which for sure contributes greatly to ASUS's success. We would like to note that ASUS graphics accelerators are sold at quite a reasonable price despite a very widely spread stereotype about high cost of ASUS products. Of course, here we don't mean the absolute cost, but the relation to the prices of the competing products. Nevertheless, the newest graphics accelerators are still pretty expensive for most users. However, time passes very fast and a tendency to price reduction has become evident. So, let's take a closer look at the first graphics card from a new ASUS accelerators family - AGP-V7700, which is already available in retail.

Closer Look

Here is the list of ASUS AGP-V7700 main features:

We won't discuss the peculiarities of GeForce2 GTS GPU from NVIDIA in detail, because we have already devoted enough time and effort to it in this Review.

Now here is the today's piece:

 

The card possesses AGP 2x/4x interface, 32MB 6ns DDR SGRAM located in 8 chips on both sides of the PCB.

The memory chips are made by Infineon and should work at 166MHz. And they do work at this frequency. Note that sometimes the end clock frequency of DDR memory given is twice as high as it actually is, because these numbers look more impressive. However, it hardly matters for reality. In other words, if you see that DDR memory working frequency is written equal to 333MHz, then you should read it as 166MHz.

One of the most peculiar things about this card is a very unusual cooler. As you can notice, the company has put aside its traditional square shaped coolers and equipped the card with a round cooler of a much bigger size than before. The fan is pretty efficient: it has 9 blades instead of 7 and the air flow is directed to the heatsink ribs. Besides, you can also see three wires connected to the fan, which indicates the presence of a tachometer. Jumping a bit ahead of our story let us also mention ASUS brand technology - SmartDoctor.

Further examination of the PCB showed that the graphics card hardly differs from the reference card. Although there are still a few things worth pointing out. First of all, there is a special hardware monitoring microchip, which activates SmartDoctor technology.

The card is of vivid yellow color. The PCB is already equipped with a connector for a daughter card with a TV-Out (the card itself is absent). Besides, the graphics card has a special empty spot for digital monitors connector.

The graphics card is supplied in ASUS's typical box with some abstract picture, which sense is too hidden for us to perceive it.

The package includes a user's manual and 4 CD disks with the software:

We can't help reproaching ASUS for supplying such outdated games with a brand new graphics card. They should have been ashamed to do so.

Overclocking

Actually, the presence of such a good cooling system should provide perfect overclockability of V7700, i.e. it should work well at non-nominal frequencies. And all our expectations came true. We managed to make the graphics processor work stable at 240MHz, while the memory showed stable functioning at the end frequencies of up to 410MHz. We would like to stress that this frequency is the today's absolute record: none of the graphics cards on NVIDIA GeForce256 DDR we tried in our testlab managed to show something like that. We have already mentioned in our reviews that the cards with a powerful graphics processor like that suffer a lot from the slow memory with the end frequency of 333MHz, which makes the graphics subsystem very ill-balanced on the whole. That is why when the memory works at 410MHz, the performance gain is expected to be quite tangible.

SmartDoctor Technology

And now let's say a few words about SmartDoctor Technology. The graphics card is accompanied by a special utility, which allows you to enjoy all the features of this technology in full.

This program can be activated on every operation system booting and after a five-second demonstration of the graphics card status it may switch to the background mode transforming into a special tray icon. SmartDoctor allows controlling the graphics processor temperature, graphics card voltage (on the GPU and on the AGP-bus) and the cooling fan rotation speed. Analyzing the obtained data the system shows the card's status summary. If it gets dramatically overheated, then the utility automatically activates and you will get a message about system overheating on the desktop together with the possibility to reduce the GPU and memory working frequencies.

Besides the card temperature control, SmartDoctor technology also reduces automatically the working frequencies of the graphics card in all possible cases. For example, in idle when no software is running, the frequencies drop down to 180/300MHz. If any 2D application has been started, such as Adobe PhotoShop, for instance, then the frequencies increase slightly (in this case to 190/330MHz), however, it is still lower than the nominal frequency. And if you start a 3D application, the frequency will return to the nominal value: 200/333MHz. In case the chipset and memory working frequencies were set higher than the nominal values before SmartDoctor began working, then without any active 3D applications they will be reduced in linear proportion. Overclocking will be withdrawn and the frequencies will be set again equal to nominal ones (200/333MHz) only if the chip temperature achieves its critical limit. So, with SmartDoctor you should bear in mind that this utility will do its best to reduce the working frequencies as much as possible in order to prolong the lifetime of your graphics card.

Installation and Drivers

Now let's pass over to the most interesting practical part of our study. At first take a look at the configuration of our test systems. The first system was configured as follows:

And the second system looks like this:

Both test systems used ViewSonic P810 (21") and NOKIA 447Xav (17") monitors.

For our tests we installed ASUS drivers version 5.16 (based on NVIDIA reference drivers version 5.16):

This driver set includes almost the whole lot of 3D graphics settings from NVIDIA reference driver. We have already discussed ASUS drivers several times in our reviews that's why we will mention only those properties pages, which can be of some particular interest to you:

This Direct3D properties page allows changing Vsync and setting Anti-Aliasing working mode.

As you see, this page allows changing the texel alignment position (you can choose one of the 7 available or just disable it at all). Besides, you can enable this effect in all Direct3D games. We would like to dwell on this feature below.

This properties page is devoted to OpenGL settings and includes anti-aliasing enabling, without changing its parameters though.

Having installed the drivers, you can see an icon in the system tray, which will activate all the settings if clicked.

Performance

We will start with 2D graphics. In the previous review we mentioned very good quality and excellent performance in 2D shown by the reference card on GeForce2 GTS from NVIDIA. We are happy to state that in 2D ASUS AGP-V7700 graphics card proved not in the least worse than the previously tested pieces (it seems to be the similarity to NVIDIA reference design that tells). The image quality provided by the graphics cards of this type meets all the requirements of the absolute majority of users. And now that the 2D graphics quality of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based cards has been significantly improved compared to GeForce256 based cards, even the owners of good 21" monitors should be pleased. Note that we said "good" monitors! The same thing refers to smaller monitors as well.

So, ASUS AGP-V7700 shows very good image quality in 2D graphics and occupies a really high position among its competitors.

We will use the following two games to consider the performance of ASUS AGP-V7700 in 3D-graphics:

These tools should be quite enough to give us a full idea of the graphics card performance when working via two main API. For a more illustrative comparison we also added the results shown by two more graphics cards to our diagrams: Leadtek WinFast GeForce2 GTS and NVIDIA reference card based on GeForce2 GTS. We will also show the performance of the overclocked ASUS AGP-V7700.




You can easily notice that ASUS AGP-V7700 performs very close to NVIDIA reference card. However, the performance shown by the overclocked card immediately attracts your attention. The performance gain is quite significant. It appears evident at first sight what a faster memory means for a graphics card. Of course, we can't generalize the results shown by this graphics card and refer them to all ASUS cards based on GeForce2 GTS, however, we have every reason to hope that overclocking lovers will easily find a nice piece among them for their extreme needs.

The V7700 package includes a software DVD player. Certainly, we tested the DVD-Video playback. The results were quite nice. ASUS DVD 2000 player supplied with the graphics card (based on PowerDVD engine version 2.5) installed without any problems and the image quality proved just perfect. The CPU utilization during the DVD Video playback didn't exceed 27%.

Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing

New NVIDIA drivers 5.22, which have appeared recently, were expected to have the complete realization of Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) function. That is why we found it particularly interesting to look at this function and to find out the advantages it offers the owners of NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS based graphics cards.

In its drivers for GPUs NVIDIA uses a very widely spread FSAA type carried out by means of super-sampling algorithm, when the image is rendered not at the selected resolution but at a resolution increased along one or two axes. For example, the image is rendered at a twice as high resolution and then is zoomed down to the selected resolution it will be displayed on the monitor. At the same time is appears possible to get rid (at least partly) of the so called "stepping" effect - some roughness on the polygon edges as well as of some other unpleasant artifacts. This result was achieved due to the fact that the final pixel of the image is composed of several more pixels by mixing their colors. For instance, if FSAA is made of 2x2 mask (super-sampling coefficient equals to 2 on both exes), then the image is rendered at a twice as high resolution along the vertical and the horizontal axes. Then these four pixels get mixed together and we get the end pixel of the final image. This method helps to get rid of the artifacts and to increase the general image quality. However, you will have to sacrifice the performance for the sake of this FSAA method.

Well, let's look at FSAA in real life. We tested this function on a system built on AMD Athlon 750 CPU. At first comes Quake3, where Anti-Aliasing effect in OpenGL driver doesn't have any grades or levels and can be either enabled or disabled. We will consider the case of 32bit color only, because the difference between 16 and 32bit color in Quake3 is quite noticeable. Besides, NVIDIA keeps convincing everybody that they will hardly be able to do without true color. We would like to add that if you change FSAAquality in registry in OpenGL section of this graphics card, you will get FSAA equal to 2x1 (FSAAquality=0) as well as to 2x2 (FSAAquality=1). We checked both cases and here is what we've got:

You can notice that at 800x600 the performance drops almost twice with FSAA enabled, and at 1024x768 it drops even greater. However, at 800x600 with anti-aliasing enabled in 2x1 mode you will be able to play quite comfortably.

And now a few screenshots obtained with FSAA in 2x1 mode:



FSAA OFF		    

FSAA 2x1

Well, what do we see? Nothing nice actually. Of course, anti-aliasing is present, though it is not so noticeable as we expect it to happen. The thing is that in this case super-sampling is applied only along one axis (2x1 mode) and the end pixel is obtained only from the two neighbouring pixels. Actually, this fact can explain only twofold performance drop and not the fourfold drop as in case of FSAA 2x2. However, if we use FSAA in 2x2 super-sampling mode, the picture we get will be a very pleasing sight.



FSAA 2x2

Nevertheless, we have to point out that the gaming performance of FSAA 2x2 proved very low. Actually, acceptable gaming conditions are only at 640x480. Well, do we really need this FSAA then? We think there is no need in it at all. We really believe that NVIDIA marketing managers shouldn't claim that the support of FSAA method is so vitally important for everybody. It appears too expensive and at the same time lacks a lot of important qualities. GPU GeForce2 GTS features enough unique peculiarities, which can be very efficiently stressed in the advertisement. And if you want to improve the image quality displayed on the monitor, just try to play at higher resolutions, because the outcome will be much better.

In order to cross the t'c let's look at FSAA realization in Direct3D, namely in Expendable. As we have already mentioned before, super-sampling coefficient can be changed only when working via Diarect3D and this feature is supported in 5.22 drivers. We watched the card performing with the medium super-sampling (the slider was moved to the center of the scale and corresponded to 2x2 mask) and with the higher super-sampling (the slider was moved to the right end of the scale and corresponded to 4x4 mask). It is pretty hard to find the visual differences between the 16 and 32bit color in Expendable that is why we will provide both results.

We would like to point out right away that you can use the super-sampling scale to the full extent only at 640x480. At 800x600 you can use only medium (2x2) setting, no matter where the slider stands. No doubt, the performance drop with the maximum super-sampling coefficient at 800x600 will be dramatic, though it is surely not an excuse for misleading the users...

The tests showed that the use of super-sampling coefficient corresponding to the medium position of the slider in the drivers settings provides good gaming performance in 16bit color and very bad gaming performance in 32bit color. On the whole, the question about the use of FSAA remains open for another while. As for us, we consider this option absolutely useless although it provides significant quality improvement. The screenshots below were taken from Need for Speed 5. We decided on them because here you can clearly see the effect made by FSAA:



FSAA OFF		    

FSAA 2x2

Well, looks impressive, really. But if you had only known how "fast" the car actually was, you would have definitely preferred to go on foot. Need for Speed 5 is actually a pretty slow game (independent from the graphics card used), and FSAA has made it absolutely impossible to play.

All in all, the today's FSAA is of no interest to anybody. Of course, you can enable it and taste the effect just to satisfy your curiosity. And we really think you'd better play at 1024x768 rather than use FSAA.

Conclusions

So, ASUS AGP-V7700 is a mass product and the tests proved that it doesn't yield to NVIDIA reference card at all. Although ASUS AGP-V7700 is practically a complete copy of the reference design, it is much more overclockable. We have to stress here that the card's overclockability is unique for each particular piece. However, we won't hesitate a second and recommend this card for those of you who always buy the newest fastest gaming products.

If you have NVIDIA Riva TNT2 Ultra or NVIDIA GeForce256 with SDR memory, then ASUS AGP-V7700 will be a good upgrading solution for you.

If you have a graphics card on NVIDIA GeForce256 with DDR memory, we wouldn't be so anxious to replace it. Try to wait till the official launching of DirectX 8.0 and look what changes will happen after that. And in the meanwhile the greater part of GeForce2 GTS potential still remains undemanded, because there are not so many games yet, which could involve all the feature of NVIDIA's new chip.

Highs

Lows

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