Summary
Using a
reference design this DDR card offers great performance for an acceptable
price. It does have some issues
though that one should be aware of (limited overclockablility, some problems I
had with TV-out).
Introduction
Back in the glory
days of 3D acceleration there were mainly 2 companies that duked it out:
Diamond and Orchid. While we all know what Diamond produced (among other cards
our beloved Stealth 220) some might not remember Orchid. They mainly released
cards with 3dfx chipsets (voodoo1 and Voodoo II) before they first were bought
by Diamond and then disappeared. Why am I talking about this? Well, it turns
out some of the employees at both Orchid and Diamond decided to try again and
form a new company: Absolute Multimedia. It gives me extra much pleasure to
talk about Absolute MM as they have their headquarters not far from me here in
Stockholm.
Not wanting to be
left out Absolute Multimedia has released a GeForce based card - the
Outrageous 3D Graphics GeForce256. This is a DDR based card with TV-out.
Below you will find
a review of the Outrageous 3D Graphics GeForce256 performed on a Celeron466
with 96 Mb Ram.
The GeForce chip
offers us gamers some nice features. Instead of writing them all again (you've
no doubt read about them a million times by now) I recommend check this PDF
file from Absolute Multimedia which includes everything you want to know: http://www.software-choice.com/acrobat/geforce.pdf
Most notable of the
features is of course:
·
Hardware T&L support.
·
350 MHz RAMDAC
·
32 Mb DDR memory
·
S-Video Out (Brooktree 869)
Installation
Installation of
video cards is very easy these days. Still, opening the case and playing
around in it can still be quite intimidating for some. To help these people
AbsoluteMM has included a little instruction-video on the CD, which slowly and
clear goes through each step that needs to be done to install the new card. A
very nice idea that is complemented with a PDF-manual on the CD. I wish they
would have printed it out but alas they haven’t. It’s included in 7
languages (the Nordic languages + English, French and German).
The drivers
supplied on the CD are not much more than reference-drivers. In the PDF-file
above they say, "Our development team tunes our drivers for optimal
performance and stability". I have not yet found any indication that they
indeed are doing some optimizations to the drivers and I myself went over to
reference drivers quite soon. The latest "AbsoluteMM driver" seems
to be based on the 3.62 drivers, which are quite old (19 November 1999)
compared to the 3.68 that are out now.
One feature of the
card that IMO is quite cool is the fact that they include something called
"Software Choice". Instead of bundling the card with a specific game
they let the buyer choose one free game form a list of 12 (at the time of
writing it included games like Unreal Tournament, Driver, Rollcage and Roller
Coaster Tycoon). You can also buy more games from the list for a reduced
price.
With the card you
also get a DVD player (WinDVD) as well as MusicMatch and RealAudio Jukebox
(let's you download, edit, create etc. MP3 files - see my
review of the Outrageous 3D Sound for more about this program).
This is an area I
never really have had any reason to complain about on any of my older cards.
At the max res 1280x1024 on my monitor the picture still is crisp even though
the text is a bit too small for my comfort. The 350 MHz RAMDAC definitely
helps giving you a superb picture.
Another feature
that distinguishes this card from other cheaper cards like the Creative's
offerings is the TV-out feature. The TV-out of course uses the, now standard,
Brooktree 869 chipset. It has a SVHS output. There’s a cable supplied but no
convert-plug so you can use it with a normal SCART-cable. Luckily I had a
separate lying around for just that. When I connected the cable to the card I
noticed that the cable was barely staying connected to the card. The cable
supplied with the card fits better but it still felt a bit loose.
The big test with
the TV-out is of course using it and here I must report that I completely
failed. I connected the card to my 14 “TV via a SVHS => SCART adapter.
This worked great with a reference GeForce I have so it should work.
Regardless if I installed the drivers supplied with the card (v3.62) or the
latest leaked reference drivers (3.76) I just couldn’t get the TV-out to
work. Nothing showed up on the TV. So I will have to leave this area untested
and hope that this was just a fluke with my card.
DVD-Playback
With the card you
get WinDVD 1.2.90. While I had PowerDVD 2.55, which includes support for
Nvidia’s Motion compensation, I installed the DVD player to see how good it
was. I can report that this program was excellent. While not as fancy as
PowerDVD it managed to produce very good results in the 2 movies I tried it on
(“A Bug’s Life” and “The Big Lebowsky”). What is even more
interesting is that when I used the program DVDGenie 3.31 (www.inmatrix.com) I
could actually turn on “GeForce Hardware Motion Compensation” (se below).
Now, I suspect that this only works in WinDVD2000 and I must admit I saw no
changes when having it on/off. TNT/TNT2 owners though should select “TNT
Interlaced” mode, as this is what the author says: “It seems that the
Interlaced WinDVD NVIDIA mode is in fact a TNT fix-up mode.
When enabled WinDVD speeds up on TNT/TNT2 cards to more or less the
same speed as PowerDVD, which is to say, a lot faster ...
Highly recommended for TNT based cards.
Please note, that it may only be faster on Interlaced 29.97fps movies,
and may introduce interlaced output otherwise.”
To
Page 2 (Benchmarks etc.)
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