GeForce 2 GTS Preview
By Björn Tidal and Scott Sherman
Updated 26 April 2000

Benchmarks

Ok, everything sounds great on paper (even a Virge) so let’s put some strain on the card.

Drivers

The drivers that were used during these benchmarks were some new Detonator drivers with the version number 5.16. This is NOT the final driver and we are a bit suspicious that FSAA doesn’t work right on them.  As we get new drivers we will update the scores. As before NVidia is continuing it's move to unify all drivers into one package. 

The system

The system that was used in these first benchmarks were a:

P-III 667
Intel CC820 Motherboard
256mb SDRAM
GeForce 2 GTS
SB Live
27GB HD

A few things should be noted here. This system wasn’t cleanly installed but instead has been used since December. While we understand that we might get better results with a completely clean reinstalled system we have no spare machine for that purpose.  This system also uses an I820 m/b coupled with SDRAM This means that we loose some % performance compared to a BX m/b or an I820+Rambus memory.

Scores

This section will be filled in during the course of this week. Since Scott actually has a life outside the site (yeah, I’m as surprised as you are) we’ve only have had time to do some preliminary benchmarks. Darin will come over to Scott this weekend for the full suite of tests.

Q3A

Settings: Sound is on in all benchmarks.

Once again let us remind you that we are running this on a I820 board with SDRAM with should mean that with a BX board you could get at least 5% better scores (and even more according to some sources). We also noted a strange problem since overclocking the GPU to 250/350 didn’t even budge the scores at 1600x1200 even a fps. You can be sure that we will investigate this further.  Up to 1024x768 you are barely scratching the surface of the GeForce 2 and your CPU is clearly limiting. After that the framerate starts to drop but 27 fps at 1600x1200x32 with everything set to max is impressive. Some of this is probably due to the 5.15 drivers using S3TC texture compression automatically. One should note that even a normal GeForceDDR will notice improvement with the 5.16 drivers due to S3TC.  The fact is though that now playing with everything set to max at 1280x1024 is now completely viable.

As expected the scores with FSAA closely match those of the actuall resolution used before downsampling - 1280x1024 for 640x480 and 1600x1200 for 800x600.  

3D Mark 2000

While waiting for some scores from a DDR board for comparison on Scott’s system I added my scores that was taken with a Absolute Outrageous DDR board with the memory clocked at 366 MHz. The CPU that was used was a normal Cel466 nso take the DDR scores with a grain of salt.

Looking at the scores it’s clear that the GF2 is faster than the GeForce even though the difference might bee a bit smaller. The GeForce had one problem – adding hardware lights killed the polygon count. Going from 1 light to 4 lights resulted in a 47% drop and going to 8 lights ended up in a 70% drop. On the GeForce 2 GTS it looks differently though: going from 1 to 4 lights just results in a 12% drop and going to 8 lights gives a total drop of 38%.  It looks like NVidia has done something right.

Conclusion

This is not a review. Therefore I won’t start to debate whether the GeForce 2 GTS is a good buy and who should get it and who shouldn’t. I just want to tell you that I personally am quite impressed with the scores. The days when you would get double the fillrate of the generation before is over – instead you will have to be content with “minor” improvements. To me the improvements are there. Suddenly running Q3A with everything set to max at 16 bit at 60 fps at 1600x1200 doesn’t seem to far away. One thing that is clear though is that NVIdia needs to come up with some clever ideas soon to counter the memory bandwidth problem that they have at high resolution and 32 bit as it will become even more apparent in their next product.

It however looks like the benefits will be at those high resolutions. If you are content to run at 800x600 then there really isn’t any reason to look at any of the next generation board unless you want to try FSAA.

The new NSR sounds intriguing and I’m curious to see what developers can do with it. Just as the T-buffer though there is no definite answer if it will be used. The same could be said for the hardware T&L. However, in contrast to some pessimists, I think that T&L will become more and more popular as the months pass. Lately you can see games advertising support for “hardware accelerated Transfer and Lightning” (Enemy Engaged: RAH-66 vs KA-52 Hokum is a example).

Last but not least the GeForce 2 has some nice video features and promises to have even less CPU-use at DVD-playback than the GeForce. Today when almost every computer has a DVD-drive this is a good thing.

When I spoke to Scott right after he came back from the press-event he told me that he really was excited on NVidia’s future. While I’m sure that some of it is under NDA the stuff he told me proves that NVidia isn’t content of just giving us a kick-ass chipset. They have plans on far more areas than that.

I know many who bought the GeForce not long ago now feel like they own a T-Ford while we are talking about a Thunderbird. However - cool down guys. Let the dust settle - check out more benchmarks. Let the price drop a bit (actually - let the boards come out first) and then start thinking about your upgrade. Who knows - we at bjorn3d.com might be able to get some stuff for give-aways in the future (no promises ..) - so start working on your groveling!. 

Okidoki - on to the Screenshots