Full Review NVIDIA's new GeForce256 'GPU'

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Before We Look At The Benchmarks

... we should summarize our expectations. GeForce comes with great 3D-enhancements, but those nice features won't be found in any of the current games. In this regard we will again have to wait for the right software to show up, as so often. The high fill rate of GeForce should enhance frame rate in current games though, although the SDR-RAM equipped cards could get a bit touchy at high resolutions, due to the rather limited memory bandwidth of less than a TNT2-Ultra's. What should we expect from the T&L-engine? Well, if all the hype we've heard is true, we should see great frame rates with almost any CPU, even in today's games. I wonder if this will be the case ...

The Benchmark Setup

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Hardware Information Header Cell - Column 1
CPU PIII 550
Motherboard (BIOS rev.) ABIT BX6 2.0 (BIOS date 7/13/99)
Memory 128 MB Viking PC100 CAS2
Network Netgear FA310TX
Driver Information Row 4 - Cell 1
NVIDIA GeForce 256 4.12.01.0347
ATI Rage Fury Pro 4.11.6713
NVIDIA TNT2 Series 4.11.01.0208
Voodoo3 Series 4.11.01.2103.03.0204
Matrox G400 Series 4.11.01.1151
Environment Settings Row 10 - Cell 1
OS Version Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A
DirectX Version 7.0
Quake 3 Arena v1.08command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0
Shogo v2.14Advanced Settings = disable sound, disable music, disable movies, disable joysticks,enable optimized surfaces, enable triple buffering, enable single-pass multi-texturingHigh Detail Settings = enabledFortress Demo
Expendable Demo VersionSetup = use Triple BufferingAudio = disable sound
Descent III Retail versionSettings = -nosound -nomusic -nonetwork -timetest