Over-clocking the GeForce256

The Benchmark Results - Quake Arena - High Quality (32 Bit)

In Quake Arena with all the features turned up, the DDR board shows us the true power of the GeForce, but it's quite surprising to see that memory bandwidth is clearly the limiting factor. Even the 4.8 GB/s of the DDR-board are not enough to feed the rendering pipeline with data fast enough, which is why we hardly see any speed gain when overclocking the core of the DDR-board, but a rather remarkable gain from increasing the memory clock This 32 bit test obviously strains the memory performance of the GeForce cards. As you look at the SDR board, you can see that it mainly gains performance when you bump up the memory speed. This isn't as much of a problem when you look at the DDR scores but you still get better gains from bumping up the memory.

If memory bandwidth is the limiting factor at only 1024x768, then we cannot possibly be surprised about the scores at 1600x1200, a resolution that stresses the memory-interface even harder. The base DDR is about 40% faster than the stock SDR board in this test, but it gains exactly 10% in frame rate after increasing the memory bandwidth by 10. It's rather obvious, even the DDR-board has a memory bandwidth that is too low.