Latest Nvidia drivers + P4 = big speed boost  

From what I've experienced and seen, it looks like this benefit is mainly for lower rez 3d rendering. If you look at the 3dmark 2001 scores running at 1280x1024x32 or higher (which is what most people run their 3d games), the gap between PIII 700's-PIV/Athlon 1.x is significantly less.

Both me and my friend have Geforce 2 Ultras both overclocked to the same degree running 12.00 drivers under Win2k. I have a PIII 800 (soon to be PIII 1Ghz) and he has a PIV 1.4. At first his machine would completely smoke mine, getting 3500+ under 3d Mark 2001 when we would run at 1024x768x32. When we bumped our resolutions up to the resolutions (with high detail) we play games at, His score went down to 2978, mine was at 2767...only a 200 point difference.

All in all, this is a good thing for people who dont want to upgrade their motherboards and CPU's to play the latest games. I am willing to bet if I had a Geforce III, it would easily beat my friends 3d mark scores.



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-Michael
mkanet@yahoo.com

Well, another way to look at it is that at the higher resolutions, the graphics card becomes the bottleneck, not the processor. So with a GeForce3, for instance, the difference between a PIII 800 and a PIV 1.4 would probably be greater.

Then again, it remains to be seen how the GeForce3 compares at high resolutions against the GeForce 2. GPU's are hitting the point where it doesn't how many triangles they can process, because memory bandwidth is the real limiting factor. That's why you saw both your machines 'hit the wall' at 1280x1024 32bit, the fill-rate of the GPU can't go any further.

I think the XBox may have an advantage here, with it's proprietary memory architecture. It'll interesting to see what the gaming landscape looks like in the fall. I'm betting on the XBox simply for 1920x1080 with DD5.1.

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

Actually, I have already seen several comparisons made between the GF2Ultra and the GF3... showing how much faster the GF3 is than the GF2ultra. However, in the same comparisons, it appears that the GF3 STILL chokes on hi rez. The results between the cards at 1280x720@32 were not significantly better. No more than a 12fps difference in most cases. This shows that memory bandwidth is still the biggest bottleneck. CPU speeds didn't seem to really make a big difference. However, the AMD machines performed significantly better than the Intel CPU's.



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-Michael
mkanet@yahoo.com

Michael,

I'm not really surprised about those findings on the GeForce3 vs GeForce2 Ultra. If that's the case, you're right that a faster CPU won't really help for high-end 3d games. I think NVidia is going to have to do something about this bandwidth issue, otherwise there's not much point in upgrading to newer GPU's. Maybe some type of a parallel architecture a la Voodoo 4 is really what's needed.

Jeff

What reviews you been reading? http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/smile.gif Everything I saw showed the Geforce 3 only performing well at high resolutions and bit depths. Its advantage is its memory architecture that lets it get something like 8GB/s.

I've got one too...Visiontek 64mb DDR w/ Athlon 1.2 (oc'd to 1.4) and 512mb PC133. Current games like Tribes 2 @ 1024x768 with Quincunx antialiasing, 32 bit color and all features on are very playable.



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Cal Z.
Mits 65903 (65" widescreen HDTV)+ RCA DTC-100
and
Gateway Destination 27" (Princeton Arcadia based)+HTPC (Pentium II 400, 256mb, 20gb+9gb HD, Radeon LE, cybertainment tv tuner, asus dvd-rom, hercules game theater xp, Kenwood VR409 DTS receiver)
crz@andrew.cmu.edu

It looks like I stand corrected. The benches I was looking at were preliminary benches done in the early releases of the GF3 with older drivers a few months back.

It looks like the GF3 is more like 14-30FPS faster than the GF2 Ultra in most cases in higher resolutions. To me, that is a significant speed increase.

I am actually waiting to see what the Radion 2 has to offer when it is available. I am hoping the Radion 2 will address all the problems associated with the Radion 1 AND have as good performance, if not better, than the Gf3...with the display quality the Radion is known for. By then, 3d games requiring directx 8 hardware acceleration will be introduced as well.




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-Michael
mkanet@yahoo.com

Hi Namlemez:

___You’re the first HTPC’er that I know that owns a GeForce3 by my recollection … So how is it for DVD playback? I am sure you have run some DVD’s through it, correct? If so, how is it compared to your prior GeForce2 GTS if that is what you owned? How about when compared to a Radeon “LE� Not for games of course as we all know about ATI’s limitations and compatibility problems in that arena …

___Thanks

___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Hunt Club Farms Landscaping Ltd.
___ xcel@midwest.idsonline.com

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New E-Mail address for the time being ... waynegerdes@earthlink.net