How many reviews are there on the internet about the Geforce series of video cards from Nvidia? So why this review?  Simply put it is a slightly different card and is from a different manufacturer, so we can see how other companies fair in manufacturing these boards, and also we can see if there is any difference in GPU's.  So lets look at what makes the VisionTek Xtasy 6564 special.

    What is different with the Ti series of GPU's from Nvidia, compared to the regular Geforce 3?  Not much, all the difference comes down to the fact that the Ti cards are clocked slightly slower (Ti 200) or faster (Ti 500), and the fact that the manufacturing processes have improved yields for the Geforce 3.   They also share the same specification base.

The Card

    The Xtasy comes with the following things in the box (as seen in the pictures below):

• Registration Card to send to receive a free copy of Power DVD

• Quick Installation guide

• Driver CD with Geforce 3 Tech demos and two game demos

• The Xtasy 6564 card running at 175/200(400MHz DDR) with S-Video out port

    I was surprised to see that although there was a TV out port on the video card there was no SVHS to RCA cable for those poor people with a TV that does not have a SVHS input on it.  Now though lets look at the drivers and also what most would like to see, how high this card overclocks.

Drivers - Install and Use

    So how did the drivers install, compared to a Matrox G400 and a Hercules Kyro II?  The driver install didn't even need a reboot, which had me confused first time as the readme included with the drivers stated it needed a reboot, yet after installing the drivers all I had to do was set the display resolution and color depth.  The other drivers either required a single reboot (G400) or no reboot at all (Kyro II).

    The drivers were the 23.11 from Nvidia without any attempt to dress them up to be VisionTek specific.  Otherwise the drivers worked perfectly with the settings being easy to access a simple to use.  Here are a couple of pictures of the driver tabs:

    Were there any 3D driver issues?  Yes two small ones that I noticed in my testing.  In Unreal Tournament when you pick up the Redeemer part of the pipes leading into the actual gun are missing on the VisionTek but not on the Kyro II.  Also in Ballistics there seems to be a 'weird' texture at certain checkpoints that isn't there on the Kyro II.  Apart from that all other games tested worked just fine.

Overclocking

    So how high did this card overclock?  Well I'll let pictures speak for themselves:

    That is a nice 37.5% overclock for both the GPU and RAM with just the standard cooling setup.  But speed is nothing if the card doesn't draw nice pictures while it's moving at the speed of light so lets look at some subjective quality assessments.

2D Quality

    This is a purely subjective look at the VisionTek's 2D quality compared to a Matrox G400, and a Kyro II card.  The colors of the card look nice and saturated but do not quite look as sharp as the G400 but are more saturated and sharper than the Kyro II.  Text is also more readable on the G400 with the VisionTek card coming in midway between the Kyro II, which comes in dead last, and the G400.

    These results will vary and may widen if I happened to have a better monitor than a Hansol 710P and was running at a resolution higher than 1152*864 with a depth of 32bpp.

3D Quality and FSAA

    The 3D quality of this card is simply amazing, with high detail Max Payne looked more realistic than with medium detail, it was like a new game.  The Serious Sam 2 demo also looked very nice, especially the Egyptian-like walls, on the VisionTek 6564.  Texture Compression and support for many other quality enhancements helps this card excel in this area. 

    One major quality enhancement is FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing), but comes with a performance penalty.  The improvements that FSAA offers are hard to see in FPS games such as Quake III and Unreal Tournament and are fairly useless for these games.  However other games, such as flight simulators, sports games and racing games will benefit from AA.  Lets see how the AA settings of the Kyro II and GeForce 3 compare by clicking on the pictures to see them compared side by side (all pictures from NHL 2002 and zoomed to 200%):

No AA

2X AA

4X AA

    As you can clearly see from looking at the top of the helmet in all the pictures the Kyro II seems to have a better picture with no AA but we see that Quincunx AA from Nvidia is better than the 2X vertical AA that the Kyro produces.   4X AA on both video cards is about the same.  Quincunx AA seems to offer the best improvement for the performance loss it gives.

    At 2X/Quincunx AA both video cards were able to play NHL 2002 at 1024*768 maximum detail without a problem, but I will not be discussing performance of this feature in the next few pages as it really can't be measured in 'smoothness' as to how a game plays with it enabled.  If you would like to see some FSAA benchmarks, check out sandv!per's review mentioned on the first page of this review.

Benchmarking Setup

    So let us look at the programs and the system used to benchmark this video card:

    We're using two different speeds of processor to see how well these cards perform with a slightly older Duron/Celeron processor, and also how it performs with a decent amount of processor power behind them.

    We are looking at 3 different OpenGL and 3 different Direct X games to give a in-depth look at performance for older, current, and new games.   All games were tested at 1024*768, 1280*960, and 1600*1200 with the highest quality settings enabled.  So without wasting anymore time lets look at some OpenGL benchmarks.

OpenGL Benchmarks

Quake 3

    How many people who use computers do not know of Quake?  Not many, and Quake III is no exception, with its high quality graphics it has become a favorite game and due to its graphics its also become a favorite for hardware reviews, why?   It has good graphics that stress the video cards' memory, it also has wide support thanks to the OpenGL engine, and supports Hardware T&L.  So lets look at how all both video cards perform at the three resolutions:

1024*768

1280*1024

1600*1200

    What can we see?  At 1024 both video cards are more CPU limited than fill rate limited with the Kyro II on a 1.2GHz overtaking the VisionTek 6564 on a 750MHz CPU.  At 1280 we see the Kyro II start to become fill rate limited but the GF3 isn't nearly as limited with both overclocking and CPU speed helping it get faster.  1600 is a different story we see the Kyro II is definitely fill rate limited and the VisionTek 6564 is also mostly fill rate limited.  Quake generally shows that that the VisionTek 6564 is 1.5-2.5 times faster than the Kyro II when the at more fill rate limiting resolutions.

MDK2

    MDK 2 is another OpenGl game that uses T&L quite a bit.  The game combines a comic-like look with a great 3D game.  Will the VisionTek 6564 dominate this benchmark as well?  Lets find out:

1024*768

1280*960

1600*1200

       At a resolution of 1024*768 the VisionTek 6564 uses it T&L engine to give it a better score than the Kyro II as an overclocked Kyro II backed with a 1.2GHz CPU almost catches the 750MHz CPU VisionTek 6564 combination.  At 1280*960 both video cards show a little bit of fill rate limitation creeping in, but only on the 1.2GHz CPU's.  At 1600*1200 the Kyro II is totally fillrate limited, yet the VisionTek 6564 isn't totally so.  When overclocked the VisionTek 6564 becomes CPU limited as it moves from 87FPS to 106FPS by using the 1.2GHz CPU.

    Now lets look at some very new games, in the form of Serious Sam 2, and Ballistics, which supports many of the new features of the VisionTek 6564 series.

OpenGL Benchmarks - Continued

Serious Sam 2

    In the first part of 2001 a game was released that combined beautiful graphics with an a lot of enemies for you to shoot down, this game was Serious Sam.  Just recently Serious Sam 2 was released and offers a new level of realism with real looking grass and nice trees and beautiful textures.  It still uses OpenGL but also has support for Direct X, albeit not as fast.  The graphics alone make this game almost fill rate limited right from 1024*768 on.  So lets look at how all both video cards perform at the three resolutions:

1024*768

1280*960

1600*1200

    In this game we see the VisionTek 6564 destroy the Kyro II as at 1024*768 it is 2-3x faster than the fastest Kyro II.  The story doesn't change at all in 1280*960 or 1600*1200, as the VisionTek tramples all over the Kyro II, which isn't even 'playable' at 1024*768.  This game really appreciates any extra fill rate/memory bandwidth that it is give as the VisionTek improves from 30fps to over 40fps by overclocking alone.

Direct X Benchmarks

Ballistics

    Ballistics is a new game that supports many of the features that the VisionTek is capable of using.  The high polygon count of between 20,000 and 110,000 a one time, effects like masked chrome, real time lights, reflections, morphing animations, bump mapping, sparks, explosions, rain, snow and fog give this game high quality graphics and also stress video cards very much.  So lets look at how the VisionTek 6564 handles it:

1024*768

1280*960

1600*1200

       We see the VisionTek is somewhat fill-rate limited at 1024*768 while the Kyro II is fully CPU limited at all resolutions except 1600*1200, as it waits for the CPU to do the instructions that the VisionTek does on the video card.   At 1280*960 the VisionTek 6564 becomes more fill rate limited and becomes more so at 1600*1200, as only using the overclocked card is there any increase.  Throught the game though the Kyro II is not very 'playable' as there are points were it slows right down, even at 1024*768, while the VisionTek doesn't do this until 1600*1200 on some of the speeds.

    We can see that new games love and fully use all the bandwidth and features of the VisionTek 6564 cards which, in comparison to the Kyro II, are playable at 1024*768, while the Kyro II isn't.  The Geforce is the clear winner here, by a large margin.

    Now lets look at some of our favorite Direct X games in Unreal Tournament and Max Payne to see if this domination by the VisionTek 6564 continues.

Unreal Tournament

    The first game based on the Unreal engine was released about the time of Quake II and is still going strong through the improvements in the engine since then.  While this game doesn't contain any T&L instructions and is more or less a Direct X 6.1 game, it is still very much played and still contains very clean and nice graphics despite its age.  So lets look at how the VisionTek stands up to this game:

1024*768

1280*960

1600*1200

    This game is mostly CPU limited but we can see some interesting things.  At 1024*768 the cards are basically CPU limited with the only exception being the Kyro II at 1.2GHz which benefits from overclocking.  At 1280*960 we see that the Kyro II doesn't have enough fill rate power to make this CPU limited but the VisionTek 6564 with double the Pixel power and quadruple the texel fill rate is not even fazed as the resolution increases.  The same thing happens at 1.2GHz with the VisionTek 6564 easily producing 60+ fps at 1600*1200.

Max Payne

    Max Payne was one of the most anticipated games of 2001 and I must say it was a very nice game even though is has a 'cheesy' story line.  The graphics are stunning, with the detail being unbelievable, as you are able to read a subway map in the game.   It truly takes advantage of Direct X 8 and uses T&L and other newer features of current video cards.  As before let us look at how the VisionTek fairs in this tough game.

1024*768

1280*960

1600*1200

    This is definitely one game in which the VisionTek 6564 wins hands down.  At 1024*768 the lowest speed VisionTek 6564 (750MHz, 175/400) beats the fastest Kyro II (1.2GHz, 195/195) by 2.5X.  Besides this all the VisionTek 6564 speeds are able to perform over 60fps at this resolution, with the fastest being 86+ fps.  1280*960 and 1600*1200 show similar patterns as the difference increases from 2.5x at 1024*768 to 3x the speed of the fastest Kyro II at 1600*1200.  While the Kyro II doesn't really become 'playable' at these settings (High, Trilinear) at any resolution, the VisionTek 6564 is 'playable' at most if not all resolutions tested.

So now that we've looked at the benchmarks, what we can conclude about the VisionTek Xtasy 6564?

Conclusion

So let us see what we can conclude about the VisionTek Xtasy 6564 card. Lets start with everyone's favorite, overclocking. The card I picked up from a store, was able to overclock to 245/540 without any problems, that with standard cooling. The drivers provided very good functionality and ease of use for this card. The card comes with a TV-out port but the lack of a S-VHS to RCA cable lessens the amount of good that the TV-out port gives.

2D quality is good, but not as good as a Matrox G400. 3D quality on the other hand is excellent, with the quality of the textures produced in games being stunning. FSAA works very well and for games that it is best designed for gives a noticeable improvement in visual quality, especially with quincunx AA enabled.

3D gaming is very nice on this card as it's competitor, the Kyro II, only comes close in two of the eighteen tests, and even then its only at 1024*768. The VisionTek Xtasy gives extremely good performance in current games, such as Quake III, Unreal Tournament, and MDK2. In newer games it still provides good quality and is very 'playable' in my opinion at 1024*768 with high settings in Serious Sam 2, Max Payne, and Ballistics.

All in all this card performs better than the Kyro II, which though being about half the price doesn't always perform within 50% of the VisionTek. The price for the VisionTek Xtasy 6564 is great right now, as it is currently going for $250 (Canadian) which is about $155 US after a $79 rebate at www.futureshop.ca.

Pros: Very nice performance in all games currently available, Good overclocking ability (results may vary), Great price, 3D Quality is excellent, Quincunx AA, Free PowerDVD.

Cons: 2D quality isn't top notch, TV-out doesn't come with cables, Either TV-out or Monitor can be used, not both. Very little 'value added' products in the box, Have to register to get PowerDVD.

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