Written By:
Date Posted: March 5, 2002

How many reviews are there on the internet about the Geforce series of video cards from Nvidia?  Lets just say allot, our own sandv!per has previously reviewed a Geforce 3 Video card, which is a good read to see the technology behind the Geforce 3 series.  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, which can be seen here

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.

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