Absolute Multimedia Outrageous GeForce2 GTS
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Features
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The
Board
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- Second Generation
Transform and Lighting Engines
- NVIDIA Shading
Rasterizer (NSR)
- High-Performance
Hardware Anti-Aliasing
- Support AGP 4X/2X,
AGP Texturing and Fast Writes
- 32-bit Color
- 32-bit Z/Stencil
Buffer
- Microsoft® DirectX®
7 and OpenGL® Optimizations and Support
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There is one thing that has become very apparent
lately. The development of video cards has surpassed the development of new
processors. While we see new processors about every year, nVidia is treating
us to six-month product cycles. When the original GeForce card debuted we
were treated to amazing quality improvements with a claim of having little
discernable hit in overall game performance. One thing that become immediately
obvious was that the original GeForce cards could not have all the eye-candy
effects enabled in a game like Quake III. While the GeForce core could certainly
run quick, it could not run quick and produce all its possible visual improvements.
Along the way nVidia added DDR (double data rate) memory to the GeForce to
improve its performance. So here we are a few months down the path and now
the GeForce2 GTS cards have hit the market. With them comes the promise of
improved gaming performance due to a higher core clock and large increase
in memory performance. Add to that the fact that more of the 3D processing
has been moved off the CPU with this chip and added to the work that the video
card is doing.
While moving more and more 3D work onto the video
chip may seem like a hard way to gain performance, nVidia has shown that this
is indeed a great way to get much higher 3D performance. With the CPU running
fewer instructions, there is a benefit equivalent to adding a higher performing
CPU along with a video card with the GeForce GTS cards. Add the fact that
nVidia is claiming a three-time performance improvement over the original
GeForce cards and suddenly they become very appealing. Absolute Multimedia
was kind enough to send their Outrageous GeForce2 GTS card for evaluation.
I believe that the results are rather impressive and definitely would warrant
your attention if you are in the market for a new video card.
