Performance Expectations
With this group of cards, I expect the GeForce DDR to be in the lead most of the time thanks to the mature drivers and serious memory bandwidth advantage. After that it should be rather close between the GeForce SDR and the Gladiac MX. I feel the Gladiac MX will do well until resolutions and color depths rise beyond what the memory can handle.
Test Results - Quake 3 Arena
The GeForce DDR is clearly our winner in this test as the Gladiac MX pulls slightly ahead of the SDR GeForce to take a narrow second place victory. The oddity with the ATi RF MAXX was seen throughout the testing at the 1152x864 resolution.
Things get a bit ugly for the Gladiac MX as the complexity of the benchmark goes upward. The limited memory bandwidth of the GeForce SDR and Gladiac MX keep them from competing at the higher resolutions. Even the MAXX is able to take the lead at the upper resolutions. One thing to note here is that the GeForce DDR is the only card performing well enough to be played beyond 800x600 at this quality setting.
Just to give you an idea of what these budget board can do even when challenged with FSAA mode, I've provided 2X Super Sampling results. The ATi solution was unable to match the same FSAA quality mode with the NVIDIA offering so we've just compared the GeForce and Gladiac results.
There isn't much of a surprise here as the GeForce DDR keeps a strong lead follow by the SDR based solutions who're running side by side. From the scores we see here, I wouldn't bother using FSAA mode with any of these solutions.
