NVIDIA Launches Titanium Series

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Three Times Titanium - Confusion Or Good Marketing? Continued

GeForce2 Titanium

This one is the most confusing of the three. It has not got a number after the 'Titanium', because it is a Geforce TWO chip. NVIDIA will replace GeForce2 Ultra with GeForce2 Titanium. However, even though 'Titanium' might sound better than 'Ultra', the latter has clearly got the better numbers going for it. GeForce2 Titanium comes with 250/400 MHz (core/memory), while GeForce2 Ultra had a clear advantage in terms of memory performance, with 250/460 MHz (core/memory). Memory bandwidth is the bottleneck for 3D gaming performance, so GeForce2 'Titanium' will hardly be able to reach the scores of GeForce2 Ultra. It might be just a bit better than GeForce2 Pro, which has a lower core clock (200 MHz), but the same memory bandwidth as the 'Titanium'.

Here's a little table that shows the most important features of the new and the old cards with NVIDIA chips:

Swipe to scroll horizontally

Header Cell - Column 0	GeForce3 Ti500	GeForce3	GeForce3 Ti200	GeForce2 Ultra	GeForce2 Ti	GeForce2 Pro
Engine	Program-mable T&L ("vertex & pixel shader")	Program-mable T&L ("vertex & pixel shader")	Program-mable T&L ("vertex & pixel shader")	Fixed Function T&L	Fixed Function T&L	Fixed Function T&L
Core Clock	240 MHz	200 MHz	175 MHz	250 MHz	250 MHz	200 MHz
Memory Clock	500 MHz	460 MHz	400 MHz	460 MHz	400 MHz	400 MHz
Pixel Fill Rate	960 Mpixel/s	800 Mpixel/s	700 Mpixel/s	1000 Mpixel/s	1000 Mpixel/s	800 Mpixel/s
Memory Bandwidth	8000 MB/s (plus "light speed memory architec-ture ")	7360 MB/s (plus "light speed memory architec-ture ")	6400 MB/s (plus "light speed memory architec-ture ")	7360 MB/s	6400 MB/s	6400 MB/s
Typical Memory Configuration	64 MB DDR SDRAM	64 MB DDR SDRAM	64 MB DDR SDRAM	64 MB DDR SDRAM	64 MB DDR SDRAM	64 MB DDR SDRAM

In terms of raw numbers GeForce3 Titanium 500 is the strongest GeForce3-solution, while GeForce2 Ultra still remains the fastest GeForce2-version. 'Titanium' is clearly NOT signalizing 'better performance'. What it is supposed to realize though is 'better bang for the buck'.

If you should not be too familiar with all the bells and whistles of NVIDIA's GeForce3 and GeForce2 cards, but want to learn about their 3D-features and effects, I suggest you read the following articles: