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Test Setup

System Hardware
Processor AMD Athlon-C, 1200 MHz/133 MHz FSB (DDR)
Motherboard ABit KG7, AMD760 Chipset
Memory 256 MB DDR SDRAM, Infineon
Hard Disk 30 GB, IBM DTLA-307030, UltraATA/100
GeForce3 Graphics Cards
ABit Siluro GeForce3 Vio v12.00 Ref. (ABit offers 14.10 on their website now, we took the reference version for comparison reasons)
GeForce2 GTS, Pro v12.00 Ref.
GeForce2 Ultra v12.00 Ref.
ASUS AGP - V8200 ASUS v12.10 Beta
Visiontek GF3 v12.00 Ref.
ELSA GLADIAC 920 ELSA v12.40 Beta
Hercules 3DP 3 v12.00 Ref. (Vendor driver n/a)
Gainward CARDEXp. Gainward Driver Release v12.00
Leadtek WinFast GF3 Leadtek Driver Release v12.00
MSI StarForce 822 MSI Drivers Release v12.00
Driver and Software
IDE/AGP driver VIA 4 in 1 V4.32
DirectX Version 8.0a
Operating System Windows 98 SE, Version 4.10.2222 A
Benchmarks and Settings
Quake III Arena Retail Version 1.16
command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0
Graphics detail set to 'Normal'
Benchmark using 'Q3DEMO1'
Evolva DirectX 7, T&L
MDK2 OpenGL, HW Lighting
Aquamark v2.1 DirectX 8, T&L, Pixel & Vertex Shader
GeForce3 Settings: Pixel Shader = YES
GeForce2 Settings: Pixel Shader = NO
Quake 3 v1.17 OpenGL, HW Transformation
Norm Setting: Quake 3 Standard Normal
HQ+T Setting: Quake 3 High Quality & Max. Texture Resolution
DroneZ OpenGL, Pixel & Vertex Shader
GeForce3 Settings: GeForce3 Bump
GeForce2 Settings: GeForce2 Bump (n/a)
MBTR v1.09 DirectX 7, No T&L
Settings: TNT/GeForce, Ansiotropic
3D Mark 2000 v1.1 DirectX 7 T&L
Settings: T&L, Athlon 3D Now
3D Mark 2001 DirectX 8 T&L, Pixel & Vertex Shader
GeForce3 Settings: Pure HW T&L, Athlon 3DNow
GeForce2 Settings: T&L, Athlon 3DNow

In order to arrive at a fair comparison, we did not change the test setup that we used for our initial GeForce3 graphics card round-up. There's just one thing to mention about the drivers we used: back in July, the latest reference driver set was ver. 12.00. All other versions that were developed by graphics card manufacturers are based on this version. Nowadays, the Detonator 4 is also available (version 2x.xx), which boosts up the performance of any GeForce2 / GeForce3 graphics card considerably! Abit offers version 14.10 on their FTP server, and this is also faster than the reference version 12.00.

Using any newer version would have forced us to re-test all other GeForce3 cards with the latest drivers as well - which would merely increase the performance level by a few percent, but would not change the overall result. That's why we stuck with version 12.00 for testing.


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