The Fastest GeForce2 GTS Card - Gainward's CARDEXpert GeForce2 GTS/400

Introduction

It's now a few months since NVIDIA released their latest high-end 3D chip by the name of GeForce2 GTS, which currently marks the top of the crop in the world of 3D-accelerators. The 'GTS' stands for 'giga texel shader' and is supposed to put some emphasis on the big numbers that this chip is able to produce. Its fill rate reads 800 million pixels per second and the texel fill rate boasts even 1.6 billion pixels per second. However, as impressive as those numbers sound, I mentioned my doubts about their validity in the real world already when I reviewed the first card with this chip two months ago. Since this time I have done a whole lot of testing in several different configurations and I will publish my findings along with the real fill rate numbers of 3dfx's new Voodoo5 5500 card in an upcoming article.

GeForce2 GTS Suffers Badly From Memory Bandwidth Limitation

I don't think that I am telling you a secret when let you know that the powerful GeForce2 GTS chip is badly suffering from the standard memory that is used with it. Only the two VSA-100 chips on the Voodoo5 5500 have even more problems with their surrounding memory. However, in case of the GeForce2 GTS card the chip clock and the memory clock are not tied together, which leaves the option to run the memory at higher speeds while leaving the chip clock alone. Unfortunately this used to be sad theory so far, because it turned out to be easier overclocking the chip than overclocking the memory. Increasing the chip clock is completely pointless however, since GeForce2 GTS is already stalled by its memory and won't deliver more performance unless the memory bottleneck has been removed. Please have a read of the 3D benchmarking article , to fully understand this issue.