With the announcement and release of the GeForce 4, many of you are probably saving your pennies towards it. No doubt, the performance and features are impressive, but what about those who don't have the cash for nVidia's latest and greatest? You can get the castrated GF4MX now, but simply put, from what I've seen, you're better off with a GeForce 3 for now. Speaking of which, price drops were seen on all the GeForce 3 cards since the GF4 announcement, and we picked up the top of the line Visiontek 6964 GF3 Ti500.
I can't comment honestly on it's performance against the GF4 Ti4600, but you can read more about GF4 technology at , which had the best technology profile of the GF4 thus far. We'll compare it with some other popular cards, and test it's performance with the games of today.
Specifications
Graphics Chipset: GeForce3 Ti 500
Graphics Core: 240MHz, 256-bit 2D/3D GPU
Memory/Interface: 64MB DDR/128-bit wide
Memory Clock: 500 MHz SDR Equivalent
Memory Bandwidth: 8.0 GB/sec.
Fill Rate (texels): 1920M/sec.
2D/3D resolution (max): 2048 x 1536 @ 75Hz
Shadow Buffers
Enables characters and objects to cast shadows on themselves (self-shadowing) and softens the edges of shadows to maximize the realism and impact on the viewer.
3D Textures
Creates material properties that cut through objects.
nfiniteFX" Engine
Enables dynamic breakthrough effects, which deliver the next leap into realism 3D graphics.
Vertex & Pixel Shaders
Adds personality and ambience, like facial expressions and surface textures simulating reality.
Lightspeed Memory Architecture"
Ensures peak performance while generating earth-shattering effects at allresolutions.
High-Resolution Antialiasing (HRAA)
Delivers a high level of detail and crisp, clean lines at high frame rates featuring Quincunx AA mode.
High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
Turns your PC into a full-quality DVD player.
VGA / TV / S-Video Out / DVI-I Connectors
Gives end-users the option of big-screen gaming on a TV, on a regular monitor, or with a digital flat panel monitor. The GeForce3 Ti 500 GPU supports DirectX 8.1 features and special effects for the ultimate 3D experience.
AGP 4X/2X, AGP Texturing Support
Takes advantage of new methods of transferring 32-bit color textures and high-polygon-count scenes.
Microsoft" DirectX" and OpenGL" Optimizations and Support
Delivers the best performance and guarantees compatibility with all current and future applications and games.
Unified Driver Support: Guarantees forward and backward compatibility.
Minimum System Requirements
" AMD K6-2, Intel Pentium II class processor, or higher
" 64MB RAM
" AGP 2.0 Compliant Socket
" A CD-ROM drive
" 10MB available disk space
" Windows 95OSR2 (or higher) or LINUX
Like pretty much every other video card you buy, you get the card, instructions and some drivers. There's not much else included, which I thought was a shame. Typically, I consider game bundles nothing more than fillers, but considering the cost of the GeForce 3 Ti500 (at the time of release, as the bundle hasn't changed since), you'd think at least DVD software or something would be included. The driver CD is a throwaway, as nothing is really customized from nVidia's reference drivers, and they are outdated.
Here's a closer shot of the card. The heatsinks are blue, which looks very nice, but other than that, there isn't anything particularly remarkable.
A closer shot of the heatsink/fan combo. For those of you who aren't careful, you better be since there's no fan guard included. I doubt this will be an issue since it faces the first PCI slot, away from most wires and fingers. The fan cools the GeForce 3 GPU, which runs at a stock speed of 240MHz. Performance is adaquate, as we were able to overclock the core slightly, but if this is what you plan to do, I suggest a Chrorb. With stock cooling, the GPU averaged about 59°C.
One thing to point out about our card, which may or may not be a problem for some of you, is that the heatsink and fan was detached from the card. Yes folks, we needed to install it after opening up the package. For the DIY crowd, this will save you the hassle of removing it for a beefier GPU cooler. For everyone else, don't worry, it's easy to install. Just get rid of the TIM though, and spread some real compound on it.
If you turn your head upside down, you can also see the Conexant Bt869 chip used for TV-Out duties. The quality was acceptable, at least, no worse than I experienced with other GeForce cards.
Being the top of the line card (the imminent release of Visiontek's GeForce 4 Ti4600 notwithstanding), you have a plethora of output options available.
Outside of the standard 15 pin VGA connection, you have the TV-out and a Digital output connector should you need it.
Like the GPU heatsink, you have nVidia reference heatsinks for the ram, but in blue. The ram itself runs at 250MHz. The effective speed of the ram is actually 500MHz, when you consider that DDR ram is double clocked. We were a little disturbed that the ram sinks didn't seem to really have any thermal interface. They seemed (and verified after yanking them off) to be only glued with dabs of whatever they used. I suggest that if you're going to be pusing this card, invest in some thermal adhesive, or at least some frag tape.
Overclocking
With the Ti500 already being highly clocked, we kind of wondered what the point would be. Since many people do this, we'd figure we'll let you know how it did. Out of the box drivers and the ones available online don't allow for any overclocking. This won't really be a problem since we'll just use the . You can also use Powerstrip, but us gimps prefer free stuff, so coolbits or the are our choices. Both are available at the .
I didn't have time to test it out with the Crystal Orb, but we did use the AGP Airlift, and I turned on all my case fans to move the air through the system. I have a nice 120mm blowhole resting above the AGP/PCI slots, so I don't think a lack of cooling will be an issue.
Ok, maybe the cooling could have been better. We only managed a mere 9MHz core overclock, but we got a decent 68MHz overclock. I'm pretty sure the stock cooling held it back. We went for a 260/570 initially, and were greeted with a nice blank screen. Even though we chose to "Test New Settings", the system wouldn't seem to recover. Some of the higher overclocked settings worked ok, but we did experience lockups occasionally. We settled for 249/568 for now.
Benchmarking
Since it wouldn't be a fair test, I've dropped the GeForce 2 from our benchmarks. If the GF2 numbers are important, please refer to our MSI StarForce review. Here's our test bed:
Athlon XP 1800+ (stock speed), 512MB (2 Dimms), Asus A7V266-E, Visiontek XTasy 6964, Windows XP Professional, Detonator 23.11, VIA 4 in 1 v4.35a.
We performed a clean install of the OS (thank goodness for Symantec Ghost), and ran our standard drivers which we've used in the past. We also watched for stability issues and image quality.
We'll be presenting the following benchmarks in order:
Quake 3 Arena
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
3D Mark 2001
Unreal Tournament
Serious Sam
Max Payne
Although the main numbers will be stock speed benchmarks, we will also provide some overclocked results. A description of the benchmarks will be provided as we move on.
Quake 3 Arena
Q3A is an OpenGL game which scales well as new CPUs and video cards are released. It is getting to be a little long in tooth, which is why it won't be the sole benchmark as we move towards our final verdict. We will be using "demo four", which is a built in timedemo with the 1.30 patch. Now, with all the upcoming benchmarks on the following pages, it's important to realize that all the scores are culmulative averages. When the action gets hot and heavy, expect to see the framerates plummet as more and more explosions and characters come on to the screen.
As expected, the framerates scale as resolution increases. There really isn't any noticable differences between the Ti500 and stock GeForce 3 at the low resolutions, but as we increase it, the faster card starts leaving the original GeForce 3 behind. It's important to note that when we overclocked the GeForce 3 to Ti500 levels, scores were virtually identical. Anyhow, the "Fastest" setting doesn't really tax the video card that much, so let's move on to higher settings...
More of the same here, as the Ti500 shows a nice speed bump over it's older brother. At over 110 frames per second, 1600x1200 gaming is very possible with the Ti. How about antialiasing?
One of the big features of the GeForce 3 family is the introduction of high-resolution antialiasing (HRAA). Image quality-wise, it is very close to 4X antialiasing, and performs closely with 2X antialiasing. Both cards play well at low resolutions, but the GeForce 3 is badly hobbled by the slower parts when compared to the Ti. At 60fps, the Visiontek 6964 makes 1600x1200 HRAA gaming playable. I am not providing numbers for 2X and 4X, since it's been tested everywhere else, and the performance scales anywhere from 10-30%, either direction depending on what level of AA, from HRAA.
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
This marks the first time we've used the Wolfenstein demo here in the labs. Created by , they're a couple of demos recorded that should provide a good idea how the heavily modified Quake 3 Engine will perform on the system. Should you want to try these demos out, grab them from . Like I said, there are two available, but we're only going to use atdemo6 which provides a better workout for the video card.
Even though the game is based on the Quake 3 game engine, we don't see framerates nearly as high as in the Quake demos. The texturing and polygon count is actually a lot higher in Wolfenstein, which would account for the lower numbers. Like Quake benchmarks though, the most popular resolutions all provide playable framerates on the Visiontek 6964.
3D Mark 2001
's 3D Mark 2001 is a synthetic Direct X 8 benchmarking suite that gives a good indication of how your system will stack up against others.
The Visiontek 6964 easily leads the pack at every resolution. Something notable was that even when overclocked to Ti speeds, the StarForce wasn't able to keep pace. I expect to have a couple of Radeon 8500s in a few days to test, but it looks like this generation of video cards (by that I mean any card released between Q3 2001 - Q1 2002) is led by the Titanium for Direct X gaming.
Unreal Tournament
I've revived the UT benchmark for this review because a lot of you still play it. It's a first person shooter, and although OpenGL is available for UT, we'll be testing the Direct X portion of the game.
Although UT tends to be more CPU intensive than Q3, a faster video card will still reward you with better framerates. No eplanation is really needed I think, as the Visiontek comes out on top again.
Serious Sam
Croteam's first person shooter was one of the big hits from last year. Mixing balls-to-walls action, some great effects, and a bargain basement price, it was no wonder people loved it. Although the polygon count was relatively low when compared with other modern day shooters, the lighting effects and texture maps are impressive. Make no mistake. You'll need a decent setup to run the game the way it was meant to.
Serious Sam seems to put a greater strain on the video card than the other benchmarks. We see the StarForce take a "serious" beating (har, har. I kill myself) here, as the faster Visiontek beats it, even with the GeForce 3 overclocked.
Max Payne
Good ole Max. Perhaps one of the coolest, and action packed games released last year. It's a Direct X based game, and some of you may recognize the Max-FX game engine, which is the same one used in 3D Mark. Unfortunently, there isn't any built-in timedemo, but you can download a mod at that will allow you to do so.
An extremely brutal game on current hardware, the Visiontek 6964 still maintains playable framerates at all resolutions. Since it's a single player game, in my opinion, eye candy is more important than framerates anyhow, so long as it stays over 30fps.
Image Quality
Image quality is , well, as good as the GeForce cards gets. Of course, speed is what you're paying for, but if you've always wanted to turn on every detail in the game options, this is the card to get.
HRAA does it's job of smoothing out the jaggies, but despite the benchmarks showing decent performance, I found the speed lacking. Cranking down to 800x600 was better for me, but who plays at that resolution these days?
Final Words
Visiontek scored a winner with the Xtasy 6964. This is by far the best performing card we've tested so far, but no doubt that'll change soon. We had decent success overclocking, and probably would have done better had we changed the chipset cooling. You're best to redo the ram heatsinks, as ours wasn't bonded as well as it could have been.
Performance, as mentioned, was excellent, and any game you buy today will run great on it as a lot of the GeForce 3 features aren't even touched yet. Be it Direct X or OpenGL, your games will run fast and pretty.
Pricing has dropped a bit with the new Ti4600 GeForce 4s being released now, and at this point, the value of the card is questionable. Our very own dsp had great success overclocking his Ti200, and being a GeForce 3 owner myself, the Ti500 doesn't have any huge advantage over it. Feature wise, any GeForce 3 owner who uses the latest Detonator drivers will essentially have the Ti500 feature set. Granted, the Ti500 overclocked is untouchable, with the exception of the GeForce 4.
So, who should buy a Visiontek Xtasy 6964, or any Ti500 card? Well, if you're saddled with a GeForce 2 card or slower, and high resolution gaming is your wish, I'd splurge on the GeForce 4. If you don't have 400$, then the Ti500 may be for you. Anyone with a GeForce 3 or Radeon 8500 should wait, as the upgrade won't be worth your while.
The Ti200 is another option, and some can reach Ti500 speeds, but don't forget you can also overclock the Ti500. Overclocked, it's performance is great, and will last you a long while. At least until the "ultra" version of the Ti4600 is released.
Pros: Great performance in all games currently available, decent overclocking ability (results may vary), 3D Quality is excellent, Quincunx AA.
Cons: No extras included. Questionable value with the release of the Ti4600 and great pricing on it's GeForce 3 Ti200 parts. Double check the contact between the heatsink and ram.
