Is a GeForce PCI pure trash ??

[Jespark]

I have a eVGA GeForce2 MX 32MB PCI.
It's not MX200, and It's memory interface is not 64 bit too.

But my scores in 3dmark2001 with a Athlon XP 1600+ is just...

<b>500 points !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!![/u]

I did a lot of things and talked with a lot of people, and the only thing I can think is that a GeForce PCI is [-peep-].

And I am asking just to be sure: Is a GeForce PCI trash or I am doing something wrong?
Does anyone there have a card like that and have any decent score?

Jespark-cwb
ME AMARRO EM CS MAS MINHA LINHA É UMA DROGA

 

[Guest]

I wouldn't think a PCI card would make that much of a difference, but I don't know about the GF2s. I know the V3 3000 showed almost identical scores for PCI and AGP, and the V5 was the first card I remember seeing that showed a noticeable difference (it was maybe 5 or 10 percent slower). But since they GF2 MX 400 SHOULD be comparable to a V5, it shouldn't be too much worse than the AGP version. Again, that assumes that the GF2 PCI doesn't have some major engineering flaw, or something.

 

[Crashman]

ALL PCI cards are trash! Guess what, AGP4x is 8 TIMES as fast as PCI. But the AGP MX card actually only uses about AGP2x data rate (even at AGP4x). Which is still 4 TIMES AS FAST as the PCI card!

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

 

[phsstpok]

I can tell you the Geforce2 PCI would not be great.

I did a little research about a year ago (maybe a little less) looking for info on PCI cards. What I gathered is that Geforce2 MX PCI took 50% to a 90% performance hit relative to it's AGP brother. (I'm guessing that's compared to AGP 1X but maybe 2X). At the time,the Radeon SDR PCI was a little better taking only about a 30%-50% performance hit. The rare and costly Voodoo5 PCI, performance-wise, was best because the performance hit was just 10%).

That said, you should score better than 500. Try doing things that will restrict the use of the PCI bus for textures because this is where the performance loss occurs. In Display manager, reduce PCI memory for texture to the minimum (I think it's 5mb). This will limit the amount of textures you can use. This may reduce the maximum resolution of some games to below 1024x768 (depending out the amount of texturing) but it will restrict the video card to mostly using local video memory instead of accessing lots of memory across the PCI bus. Try Geforce Tweak. See if it has options to further control PCI bus usage. (Mind you, I've never actually done any this).

Anything you can do in games to limit PCI memory usage will make the games more enjoyable and faster. 16-bit colors vs 32-bit will cut down graphics (local+PCI) memory usage by exactly half. This looks ugly. 16-bit "textures" doesn't converve as much memory but it looks better and still helps performance. Texture compression helps a lot in the memory department but unfortunately looks terrible with Geforce cards. Double buffering vs triple buffering saves memory. Again quality goes down but speed goes up (especially if you are on the border of using PCI memory vs using only local video memory).

<b>We are all beta testers!</b>

 

[Guest]

"I did a little research about a year ago (maybe a little less) looking for info on PCI cards. What I gathered is that Geforce2 MX PCI took 50% to a 90% performance hit relative to it's AGP brother. (I'm guessing that's compared to AGP 1X but maybe 2X). At the time,the Radeon SDR PCI was a little better taking only about a 30%-50% performance hit. The rare and costly Voodoo5 PCI, performance-wise, was best because the performance hit was just 10%)."

Cool, pretty close to what I expected.