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Benchmarking
Here are the test machine specs:
AMD Thunderbird "AYHJA" Core, 1.4GHz (10.5x133)
ABIT KG7-RAID
512MB Kingston Value DDR ram
2 x 60GB Maxtor Diamondmax, RAID-0
MSI StarForce 822 GeForce 3, Det. XP v21.81
Creative Annihilator 2 Ultra, Det. XP v21.81
Windows 2000, Service Pack 2
VIA 4 in 1 v4.33
AMD Driver Pack v1.20
Quake 3, v1.30 Final
3D Mark 2001
I included the GeForce 2 Ultra here for comparison reasons. It's only going to be included in a few benchmarks, but I will be including the overclocked scores of the StarForce 822. Since I've tried to save some time, I decided to run scripts for 3D Mark 2001, so no more fancy screenshots. You'll have to settle on bar charts I'm afraid. If I get enough support, I'll include pink coloured bars to make up for the lack of 3D Mark screenshots. I've decided to skip benchmarking with the shipping drivers, as I'm sure most of you will choose the latest drivers from nVidia. If you want comparisons between the Detonator XP drivers and the previous official reference drivers, I'd suggest reading my quick Detonator Comparison article from September 2001. Those scores will vary a bit from todays, due to a reinstall of my OS recently, but the comparison is pretty accurate between the old and new detonators.
Fear not, I chose not to bore the reader with 15 different benchmarks, but I will present two, Quake 3 and 3D Mark 2001. I decided to skip Unreal Tournament because the game tends to be more CPU intensive than video. Make no mistake though, a 2MB ATI Rage won't cut it for UT.
Benchmarks
Quake 3 Arena, Demo four, High Quality, Sound On, No AA, 32 Bit Colour
As revealed in the specifications earlier in the review, the GeForce 2 Ultra takes a brute force approach in the benchmarks. Because the video card isn't taxed all that much at low resolutions, it manages to keep pace with the GeForce 3. As resolution increases, we can see the GF3's Lightspeed memory architecture pulling away, particularly when overclocked...
Quake 3 Arena, Demo four, High Quality, Sound On, 2 x AA, 32 Bit Colour
With FSAA enabled, things get a little rough on the GF2 Ultra. There's a lot more information being processed, and thus increasing demand on the memory pipeline. At the lower resolutions, it's still playable on the Ultra, but this is where we see the GF3 showing it's muscle. I didn't include overclocked scores because although this is the second graph I'm showing, it's actually the last benchmark I did. I mention last page that my video card was crapping out on me at this point. Oh woe be me....
Quake 3 Arena, Demo four, High Quality, Sound On, 4 x AA, 32 Bit Colour
At 4x FSAA, I don't feel it's worth mentioning the GF2 Ultra anymore. At 640x480, it is benchmarking in the mid 50fps range. Sure, it's great when you're walking in a square room, but once the fighting starts, good luck maintaining that speed. Here, we can see the overclocking paying off at all resolutions on the StarForce 822. The GF3 is handling the increased bandwidth requirements quite well, but don't bother with 4x FSAA at the higher resolutions. Don't ask me why 1280 performance is less than 1600 performance. I did the test 3 times, and got the same results. Even more odd was the fact that it happened again when overclocking the video card. I don't expect this to be the case with others, so I'm just going to label this as a lab error.
Quake 3 Arena, Demo four, High Quality, Sound On, Quincunx AA, 32 Bit Colour
The whole deal with Quincunx AntiAliasing is that you get near 4x AA quality at 2x AA speeds. As you can see in the benchmarks, it is close indeed. I'll have some screenshots later on, but I have to say, I don't like the Quincunx AA. I find the picture noticably blurrier, and although the benchmarks are similar to 2x AA, actual gameplay felt choppier.
The news around the Detonator XP drivers is that Direct X performance gets a big kick in the butt. Um, I mean that in a good way. OpenGL shows gains, but it's D3D that gets the biggest boost. For 3D Mark 2001, I stuck with antialiasing off in all tests. With AA on, you'll get the usual loss in performance but fewer jaggies. This is a synthetic benchmark anyhow, so general performance should be enough of an indicator. I'll let the benchmarks speak for themselves.
3D Mark 2001, Bit Colour, NoAA, Z-Buffer 24 Bit, DXTC, D3D Hardware
So, like the Quake 3 scores, the StarForce 822 runs rampant over the GeForce 2 Ultra. More to the point, the Detonator XP drivers do seem to reveal the GeForce 3 it's true power. Overclocking nets even better results.
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