Test Setup
| System Hardware | |
|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Athlon-C, 1200 MHz/133 MHz FSB (DDR) |
| Motherboard | ABit KG7, AMD760 Chipset |
| Memory | 256 MB DDR SDRAM, Infineon |
| Hard Disk | 30 GB, IBM DTLA-307030, UltraATA/100 |
| GeForce3 Graphics Cards | |
| ABit Siluro GeForce3 Vio | v12.00 Ref. (ABit offers 14.10 on their website now, we took the reference version for comparison reasons) |
| GeForce2 GTS, Pro | v12.00 Ref. |
| GeForce2 Ultra | v12.00 Ref. |
| ASUS AGP - V8200 | ASUS v12.10 Beta |
| Visiontek GF3 | v12.00 Ref. |
| ELSA GLADIAC 920 | ELSA v12.40 Beta |
| Hercules 3DP 3 | v12.00 Ref. (Vendor driver n/a) |
| Gainward CARDEXp. | Gainward Driver Release v12.00 |
| Leadtek WinFast GF3 | Leadtek Driver Release v12.00 |
| MSI StarForce 822 | MSI Drivers Release v12.00 |
| Driver and Software | |
| IDE/AGP driver | VIA 4 in 1 V4.32 |
| DirectX Version | 8.0a |
| Operating System | Windows 98 SE, Version 4.10.2222 A |
| Benchmarks and Settings | |
| Quake III Arena | Retail Version 1.16command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0Graphics detail set to 'Normal'Benchmark using 'Q3DEMO1' |
| Evolva | DirectX 7, T&L |
| MDK2 | OpenGL, HW Lighting |
| Aquamark | v2.1 DirectX 8, T&L, Pixel & Vertex ShaderGeForce3 Settings: Pixel Shader = YESGeForce2 Settings: Pixel Shader = NO |
| Quake 3 | v1.17 OpenGL, HW TransformationNorm Setting: Quake 3 Standard NormalHQ+T Setting: Quake 3 High Quality & Max. Texture Resolution |
| DroneZ | OpenGL, Pixel & Vertex ShaderGeForce3 Settings: GeForce3 BumpGeForce2 Settings: GeForce2 Bump (n/a) |
| MBTR | v1.09 DirectX 7, No T&LSettings: TNT/GeForce, Ansiotropic |
| 3D Mark 2000 | v1.1 DirectX 7 T&LSettings: T&L, Athlon 3D Now |
| 3D Mark 2001 | DirectX 8 T&L, Pixel & Vertex ShaderGeForce3 Settings: Pure HW T&L, Athlon 3DNowGeForce2 Settings: T&L, Athlon 3DNow |
In order to arrive at a fair comparison, we did not change the test setup that we used for our initial GeForce3 graphics card round-up. There's just one thing to mention about the drivers we used: back in July, the latest reference driver set was ver. 12.00. All other versions that were developed by graphics card manufacturers are based on this version. Nowadays, the Detonator 4 is also available (version 2x.xx), which boosts up the performance of any GeForce2 / GeForce3 graphics card considerably! Abit offers version 14.10 on their FTP server, and this is also faster than the reference version 12.00.
Using any newer version would have forced us to re-test all other GeForce3 cards with the latest drivers as well - which would merely increase the performance level by a few percent, but would not change the overall result. That's why we stuck with version 12.00 for testing.
