Overclocking Results - Evolva
Hammering the card for fill-rate and T&L performance at the same time apparently is just too much for the Radeon as the GeForce2 card pounds it. Will things change in 32-bit color mode?
Things get better for the Radeon once 32-bit color comes into play again but Evolva still seems to have shown us that the Radeon has a tough time dealing with the raw power of the GeForce2's massive fill-rate. The 10% overclocked memory on the GeForce2 helps tremendously and almost keeps the Radeon from taking top honors at the top of our resolution scale.
If you stop to consider how the Radeon does before and after you see a 64 MB GeForce2 board running overclocked memory, you start to really value Hyper Z and wonder just how long until NVIDIA comes up with some type of solution for this memory problem. We're talking a real solution. Once that happens, things can get really scary for ATi.
Wrap Up
Without a doubt ATi has a reason to still be standing tall after further proof that it's now shipping a leading edge product capable of matching and at times surpassing the industries best. The things to keep in mind here is that the Radeon may be our overall choice for best consumer graphics solution but by no means is it able to run over the competition from NVIDIA. The GeForce2 series of cards provide formidable performance and when the 64 MB GeForce2 board is brought into the picture, things are extremely close. Even at the higher color and resolutions, the Radeon barely squeaks by at times with narrow victories. I don't think either solution is a bad choice for a serious graphics upgrade but I still cannot see myself advising anyone to drop his or her GeForce2 for this product unless they greatly value the other Radeon specific benefits. Hopefully this addition will add to what you already know from the initial write-up and assist you in future decisions if you happen to end up in the market for this caliber of a graphics solution. Thanks to ATi and NVIDIA, you'll probably end up having to make a tough choice between the two competing chips but without fierce competition like this, our choices wouldn't be nearly as interesting.
