Introduction
Since the release of our first two GeForce2 articles, Tom's Take On NVIDIA's New GeForce2 GTS and NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Battle Royal , two questions continue to cloud the issue, "Is the GeForce2, really, worth getting? If it is, what brand do you recommend of all the available cards?" With this latest update, the Asus AGP-V7700 Pure GeForce2 review, I hope to take the smoke and mirrors out of the equitation to make the purchasing decision easier. Detailed Information will be provided on availability, package contents, performance, pricing, stability, unique features and odd quirks with our review board. Most of the little things are what will likely be setting each card apart from one another in this comparison. Asus is hoping to have enough of these small jabs and land the knockout punch to become our new GeForce2 champion.
The Chipset
Unless you've been disconnected from the net for a while now, you should know that the GeForce2 is NVIDIA's latest and greatest graphics chipset that has all the bells and whistles that crown it currently the best 3D consumer graphics solution on the market. The chipset features high fill-rates, faster than ever T&L (thanks to an increase core clock speed), highest clocked DDR memory available, Full Scene Anti Aliasing and the extremely solid DirectX and OpenGL driver support from one of the best driver development teams in the graphics industry, period. The combination of all these factors elevates this chipset to what is currently the best in the consumer graphics world. For greater detail on this chipset, I encourage you to read Tom's Take On NVIDIA's New GeForce2 GTS .
How Much Better?
The lingering decision for many folks is if they should replace their previous graphics solution for the newest board on the block at the cost of $350-400. Many of you are reluctant to do so and have every reason to be since the cost difference between a GeForce DDR (available for about $220) and the GeForce2 is huge. In our previous GeForce2 round up we found that the GeForce performed very well until we began hitting high resolutions that began to take its toll on the GeForce fill-rate and allowed the faster clocked GeForce2 to take a respectable performance lead. My outlook on this issue is pretty simple. If you are on a budget or have a GeForce board and are happy, stick with the GeForce. Don't feel like you're settling for "just some video card" as recently John Carmack from ID Software stated, "GeForce is my baseline for current rendering work, so I can wholeheartedly recommend it." If Leading edge game programmers such as Mr. Carmack are reccomending this board, you can feel confident that upcoming games will be playing very well on it. However, if you have the money to spend and need more graphics processing power or must have the best then the GeForce2 GTS is for you. For me the move to a GeForce2 meant I could play Quake 3 at 1024x768x32 at the constant high frame rate that I must have when playing so it wasn't too difficult of a decision. Later on in the review you can take a peek at how the GeForce compares and come to your own conclusion on this issue as well.