| The
Winfast GeForce2 GTS card was very cooperative
with our i820 test-bed ( the Soyo SY-6ICA
motherboard) and installed within minutes.
We also tried to set the card up on a BX chipset
based board, the SY-6BA+IV from Soyo (our
secondary test bed for the Voodoo5 preview) but
the card would lock up after a few frames of a
Quake3 time demo. This inevitably happened
at any AGP bus speed setting, even the specified
66MHz. We finally set the AGP aperture in
the motherboard BIOS to 16K and were able to
complete a loop but it was very slow with this
setting.
This
may be an isolated case with this motherboard,
we are not sure. Regardless, this problem
should be easily remedied with a BIOS revision
for the Winfast. Hopefully Leadtek will be
diligent about following up on this
quickly. In addition, we will update this
review with benchmarks and ratings should we get
our hands on a BIOS patch in the coming
weeks. Let's move onto the good stuff.
As
noted, the i820 based system installation was
uneventful and the drivers were very familiar.
click
for full view
The
Leadtek drivers we used for testing were based
on the NVidia 5.16 release. They support
full scene Anti-Aliasing (OpenGL only at this
time) and as well as a host of other features
for tweaking your display on your desktop, in a
game or with the Video Overlay for a TV Tuner
card etc. In addition, the Winfast drivers
fully support overclocking of the card and as
you can see, overclock it we did! More on
this later. Leadtek's "Speed
Runner" menu lets you adjust core and
memory speed.
click
for full view
Yes,
that is indeed a GeForce2 GTS chip in there
isn't it?
A
Few Words and Pictures On FSAA The NVidia Way
We
won't spend too much time on this section either
since it has been covered extensively online by
a number of sites including Hot Hardware.
Instead we'll let the screen shots speak for
themselves.
Click
images for full viewing
|
Quake3
No FSAA
|
Quake3
FSAA
|
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Quake3
NVidia High Polygon Level
|
Quake3
NVidia High Polygon Level
| Original
TGAs - File sizes are approx. 1.3MB each
Quake3
No FSAA
Quake3 FSAA
Quake3
NVidia Level w/ FSAA Shot1
Quake3
NVidia Level w/ FSAA Shot2
Screen
shots and the FSAA debate (NVidia versus 3dfx)
are totally subjective. I personally feel
after experiencing both 3dfx's 2X and 4X FSAA
and NVidia's FSAA, that NVidia's FSAA is about
on par with 3dfx's 2X setting. Actually,
in some cases, I like the 3dfx 2X version even a
little better. Again, this is very
subjective so you'll have to judge for yourself.
One
area that is very impressive is the high polygon
count demo that NVidia did for the GeForce2
release. These shots show the level of
detail and a quick view of things to come with
games that can and will be released in the near
future. Developers will take advantage of
all this new horsepower being brought to market
by the Graphics Card industry. It is a
beautiful thing, literally.
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