Performance Expectations
As in our last review I don't expect to see much variance aside from the typical margin of error when running tests. All of the contestants are based no the exact same reference driver so unless a manufacturer decided to be especially brave and try aggressive settings, I doubt we'll see a clear performance winner.
Performance Results - Quake3 Demo001
Quake 3 using the Normal setting doesn't prove to be much of a challenge to any of the cards but does show a couple of noteworthy things. The first was the fact that the Asus V7700 is performing just the same as the rest of the pack. The second note was that you'd see good proof as to why a GeForce2 would be useful at the 1024x768x16 resolution. Where the GeForce offered a good 85 FPS average, the GeForce2 pushed well over 100 FPS. So that's overkill right? Not really. It also provides you with a minimum framerate that is probably no lower than 80 FPS where the GeForce might drop somewhere in the 60 range. That might seem a bit odd but most of our veteran Quake players will follow what I'm getting at.
Competition looks a bit tight here even for the GeForce board. I would still pick the performance of the GeForce2 group but the GeForce board isn't performing too shabby.
For fun, I decided to see how combining FSAA and High Quality settings would change things. As you can see I was forced to use lower resolutions for any meaningful results as the performance drops tremendously as the resolution rises. At 640x480 there is no question that the GeForce2 competitors are all working at a playable level but as we climb in resolutions they all fall off dramatically to an unusable status.
