3D Blaster GeForce2 MX graphics cards are shipped in black boxes that have already become common for all Creative's products.
by FastSite
12/02/2000 | 12:00 AM
Lately one could hardly come across any freaks of nature among graphics cards based on NVIDIA graphics chipsets. A couple of years ago, during the reign of TNT and then TNT2 chips, video cards based on these processors had a good deal of differences - both in the type of memory chips and its manufacturer, as well as in access time. At the same time there were much fewer cards manufacturers sticking to the reference design, recommended by NVIDIA. So, made by different manufacturers, cards of the same class differed in performance, overclocking and 2D image quality much greater than those present ones, based on GeForce2 chips. <%BANNER[article]%>
Nowadays NVIDIA recommends graphics card manufacturers variants of reference design for their cards based on NVIDIA graphics processors, shipping chipsets alongside with graphics memory chips. That's why today's ordinary (i.e. without any extra functions) GeForce2 MX-based cards from all well-known manufacturers differ only in PCB (printed circuit board) and the memory chips (though there is no great variety: 6ns SDRAM by Hyundai is installed in 90% of the cards, while in the others 6ns SDRAM by Samsung is used). Some manufacturers also use active coolers instead of heatsinks in most cards, but this is most unlikely to be taken for some significant design change, as any user can replace a cooler or a heatsink.
But Creative managed to manufacture the freakiest GeForce2 MX- based card that will be discussed further in this review. Actually, it's Creative that works out reference designs for NVIDIA and consequently enjoys the tightest partnership relations with this company. Perhaps, that is a reason for Creative's success with this new video card. Furthermore, any graphics card manufactured by Creative automatically gets to the reference rang. Anyway, Creative will apparently remain the only manufacturer of graphics cards based on GeForce2 MX with DDR SDRAM.
3D Blaster GeForce2 MX graphics cards are shipped in black boxes that have already become common for all Creative's products.
The sets shipped include drivers and two games, Rage Rally and Midnight GT: Primary Racer, on a CD disk. The box also contains a huge multi-language user's manual.
One can notice at once that when working on this graphics card the developer aimed at making it as cheap as possible. For example, even the card itself has a long and narrow PCB made of green textolite. That allows the manufacturer to save on materials.
For the same reasons, i.e. in order to reduce the product cost, Creative has provided the new card neither with DVI-Out, nor with TV-Outs or a second D-Sub Out. There is simply no layout for all these features on the card PCB. That means you shouldn't hope to see any other modifications of this graphics card equipped with more outputs in addition to the only D-Sub (a common VGA-Out).
At a glance, it is also striking to see no cooler or heatsink on the GPU whatsoever. Despite this fact, surprising as it may seem, the card performs well enough at nominal frequencies. By the way, tests have proven that neither a cooler nor a heatsink are necessary for cards based on GeForce2 MX: any cards based on this graphics chipset work quite well at nominal frequencies without cooling. However, no one but Creative has ventured to take the chance of saving on a heatsink.
Nonetheless, keep in mind that the absence of a cooler and/or a heatsink on graphics chipsets may affect extreme overclocking, restricting the chipset's ability to operate at frequencies that are higher than the nominal. But indeed the situation is not that frustrating. Provided the card is not overclocked, its performance, as we have already stated, is OK without any extra cooling. If it is overclocked, then the right decision is to install a more effective Blue Orb cooler designed specifically for graphics cards. In this case no regular heatsink is needed. So why pay for it? In case of Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX we didn't pay any extra for the heatsink, which will hardly be useful for overclocking. That's why in testing we have installed Blue Orb on the chipset to increase stability when overclocking and to prevent the graphics accelerator from breaking down.
According to NVIDIA's specifications, the chip operates at the nominal frequency of 175MHz.
Unlike 6ns (operating at the frequency of 166 MHz) SDR SDRAM chips on all the other GeForce2 MX based cards, there is 7ns DDR SDRAM from Hyundai installed on this card.
That does not mean, however, that Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX has greater memory bandwidth. The thing is that Creative has cut memory bus width on its graphics card down to 64bit, while other cards have a 128bit bus. Merely to make the card cheaper Creative has naturally preferred cheaper 7ns DDR SDRAM memory chips to 6ns SDR SDRAM chips.
Default memory frequency of Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX is 286MHz (143MHz DDR) and that is the nominal frequency for 7ns chips. If we compare the memory bus bandwidth of 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX and that of standard graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForce2 MX, we will get 2288MB/sec for against 2656MB/sec, correspondingly.
Of course, the combination of a 64-bit bus and DDR memory operating at 143MHz has a smaller bandwidth than a 128-bit SDR memory working at 166MHz other GeForce2MX-based cards are equipped with. But apart from memory bandwidth there is a number of factors that tell on the performance of GeForce2 MX with DDR memory. We have carried out a simple experiment: we checked the performance of Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX with the memory overclocked up to 333MHz (166MHz DDR). In theory, graphics memory bandwidth in his case should be the same for both GeForce2 MX with DDR SDRAM and a similar accelerator with SDR SDRAM. But practice shows that Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX with DDR memory is slower:
The trick is that on every memory request, it gives the data back not right away but some time later. This way, to make DDR memory operate two times quicker, it should respond twice as fast. In other words, DDR memory latency should be twice as short as that of SDR memory. And indeed the latencies of DDR and SDR chips are almost equal. Moreover, as it comes from the above given diagram, even using a narrower bus (even though it operates at higher frequency) doesn't compensate for this effect, although it provides some performance gain by transmitting small data packs.
An enclosed disk contains drivers based on version 6.34 reference drivers by NVIDIA . But to stress the fact that it is a real brand name product, Creative provided these reference drivers with Blaster Control utility changing the drivers outlook.
Although all the pages of Blaster Control differ in appearance from common Detonator drivers, their functions are practically identical to those of reference drivers:
After the drivers are installed, the utility icon appears in the system tray:
The only considerable difference between the reference and new pro-detonator drivers is a default page that allows increasing memory frequency. In reference drivers (as soon as a certain key in the register is set) there appears a page enabling the user to vary the clock speed of both the graphics chip and the memory. However, it's only the memory that can be overclocked via Creative's drivers. It is a pretty reasonable decision, as only memory clock speed produces an essential influence on performance of graphics cards on NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS and GeForce2 MX chips. Chip overclocking doesn't provide any tangible performance increase but only causes more cooling troubles. And as long as there is no cooler on Creative GeForce2 MX DDR graphics card, we believe it's doubly reasonable not to provide a chip overclocking page:
To test 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX we used the following testbed:
We used Microsoft Windows98 and NVIDIA Detonator 6.35 drivers.
For a better comparison we took SUMA Platinum GeForce2 MX 32MB SDRAM graphics card.
As we reported earlier, we used Blue Orb cooler on our GeForce2 MX card to provide more stable and secure performance of the graphics card. The tested Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX overclocked up to 225MHz chip and 380MHz (190MHz DDR) memory frequency. Considering the card was equipped with ones of the slowest and the cheapest DDR SDRAM chips with 7ns access time, these results are really good.
Just for you to compare, we overclocked a regular NVIDIA GeForce2 MX based card. A card with SDR memory demonstrated stable work at 220/210MHz. To see which of the two cards had gained higher frequency and performance, we checked the card performance every time the frequency got 5MHz higher (that makes 10MHz for a 64-bit DDR memory). So, we measured the card performance in Quake3 demo001 at the resolution of 1024x768.
As it follows from the curves above, in 16bit mode overclocking the DDR memory with narrower bandwidth proves more efficient than overclocking the wider SDR. In 32bit mode the performance gains in both cases are practically equal. It is a curious fact that in resolutions with the 16bit color depth the curves for DDR and SDR memory look very much like a part of a sinusoid (for DDR memory the curve goes steeper). In other words, overclocking appears more efficient within 143-160MHz and then in case of extreme overclocking (namely within 170-180MHz) the efficiency falls drastically. The reason is that in 16bit color depth mode the bandwidth of DDR and SDR memory is not that determining as it is in 32bit mode, where performance gain depends almost linearly on the increase in memory clock speed.
If we compare the performance of Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX overclocked to its maximum and the results of a standard card based on the same graphics chip and equipped with SDR memory, the latter proves to ensure higher speed. Unfortunately, even high overclockability of the DDR memory on Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX doesn't help to make this card work faster.
At first the cards were tested in Quake3 Arena with demo001. The tests were run in two modes: 16 and 32bit color depth. For a clearer picture, we added the overclocking results for both cards to the diagrams as well.
The results of Creative graphics card turned out worse than those of its rival equipped with SDRAM memory. The percentage looks as follows: in 16bit color at a lower resolution 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX loses 8.7% and in 32bit - circa 28% . In 32bit color mode the resolution for 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX is set to1024x768 and it loses 15.5%. The same lagging-behind is obvious in 32bit mode (at the resolution of 800x600): 26%. However, we should point out that the overclocked DDR card left its non-overclocked SDR competitor behind though failed to repeat this success in case the SDR card was also overclocked.
These results were received in Quake3 Arena quaver demo:
As you can see, 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX drops behind again. The percentage lag in quaver demo is similar to that in demo001.
The following results were obtained in 3Dmark 2000 Pro. We didn't test the overclocked cards in 3Dmark 2000 Pro at all.
The tests run in 3Dmark 2000 Pro prove the results achieved in Quake3 Arena. 3D Blaster GeForce2 MX loses about 13.1 % in 16bit color depth and 24.2% in 32bit at nominal frequencies.
Creative engineers planned to develop the cheapest graphics card based on GeForce2 MX chipset, but for a retail buyer it has turned out to be the most freaky card with a moderate price. Among its positive features we can name Creative's traditionally high 2D graphics quality. However, a considerable lag in 3D applications behind regular cards based on GeForce2 MX may be excused only if the market newcomer's currently too high price gets down to reasonable limits. And as the public interest to this new unusual card will cool down, its price is likely to turn even lower than that for similar cards equipped with SDR memory.
But to our mind, Creative developed this graphics card not for the mass retail sales but for large OEMs. These are usually long-term contracts, so constructive and marketing decisions should ensure the maximum reliability and a long-lasting attractiveness of the graphics cards.
This version is corroborated by the low-profile design of the card and the absence of a cooler and heatsink (brand name OEMs tend to equip their PCs with no supplementary active cooling and restrict themselves to only nominal cooling). Furthermore, graphics cards in PCs like that are much more rarely overclocked. Thus, the card may be made as cheap as possible because price is the main determinant for OEM partners.
As DDR chips will fall in price, Creative will be able to easily renovate and speed up its graphics card equipping it with faster memory and this way maintaining the required price-quality balance.
It seems quite feasible that on the memory chips market DDR SDRAM modules with the frequencies of 166-200MHz will soon become even cheaper than high-speed SDRAM modules. Presently graphics cards are the main sphere where DDR SDRAM memory is used. In the nearest future almost all manufacturers will launch in mass production DDR SDRAM memory chips with various frequencies for PC2100 and PC2600 modules. Consequently, DDR SDRAM chips will fall in price and high-speed SDRAM will risk to fall out of the PC market (none of the manufacturers has announced a launch of chipsets for DIMM SDRAM with 133MHz+ frequencies). And to manufacture chipsets like that in small quantities isn't promising as long as their niche on the market keeps shrinking. Thus, DDR SDRAM is likely to share the fate of EDO RAM...
As things stand, it is a wise idea to develop a graphics card supporting DDR SDRAM now. However, we have six months ahead to find out whether it will really prove so.