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NVIDIA's new Titanium line of
cards and ATi's new Radeons have been commanding most of the
spotlight these days. With the release of these "next
generation" products, attention shifted focus, and prices on
the preceding generation of products dropped considerably,
placing some very powerful cards within reach of mainstream
buyers.
This is the case with the
"vanilla" GeForce 3 powered,
MSI
Starforce 822 we'll be looking at today. A few
short weeks ago, if we said a full featured, very
overclockable GeForce 3 with TV-Out, Video-In and Video-Out
would be available for about $250 you'd think we were crazy,
but this is exactly what has happened. The Starforce
822 is a very complete product, with features and a bundle
usually reserved for much more expensive products.
Let's get down and dirty with the Starforce 822 and see if
it can hang with the current "top of the line" cards costing
hundreds more...
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| Specifications Of The
MSI Starforce 822 GeForce3 |
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Your Standard
Reference Design With a Twist! |
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Click any Image to Enlarge
GeForce3 Features:
- nFiniteFX engine for
full programmability
- Lightspeed Memory
Architecture for unmatched performance
- Surface engine for
high-order surfaces and patches
- Programmable Vertex
Shader
- Procedural
deformations
- Programmable matrix
palette skinning
- Keyframe animation
interpolation
- Morphing
- Fog effects (Radial,
Elevation, Non-linear)
- Lens effects (Fish
eye, Wide angle, Fresnel effects, Water refraction)
- Programmable Pixel
Shader
- Phong-style lighting
for per-pixel accuracy
- Dot3 bump mapping
- Environmental bump
mapping (EMBM)
- Procedural textures
- Per-pixel reflections
- HRAA?high-resolution
anti-aliasing
- Featuring Quincunx AA
mode
- Integrated hardware
transform engine
- Integrated hardware
lighting engine
- DirectX and S3TC
texture compression
- Dual cube environment
mapping capability
- Reflection maps
- Accurate, real-time
environment reflections
- Hardware accelerated
real-time shadows
- True, reflective bump
mapping
- Z-correct bump mapping
- Phong-style lighting
effects on bump maps with reflections
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Continued:
- High-performance 2D
rendering engine
- Optimized for 32-,
24-, 16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes
- True-color hardware
cursor with alpha
- Multi-buffering
(double, triple or quad) for smooth animation and
video playback
- High-quality HDTV/DVD
playback
- High-definition video
processor (HDVP) for full-screen, full-frame video
playback of HDTV and DVD content
- Independent hardware
color controls for video overlay
- Hardware color-space
conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
- Motion compensation
- 5-tap horizontal by
3-tap vertical filtering
- 8:1 up/down scaling
- Per-pixel color keying
- Multiple video windows
supported for CSC and filtering
- DVD sub-picture
alpha-blended compositing
Specially
Selected Components
- GPU and DRAM chips are
selected for high performance and yield.
- High Over-Clocking
Potential
Software Package:
- Install / Driver
CD-ROM manuals.
- Full version of PowerDVD 3
- Full version Ulead Video
Studio 4
- MSI 3D Turbo 2001
- Idea Box .AVI
Collection
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THE BUNDLE:
The MSI Starforce
822 has a very complete bundle. Inside the box you'll
find the card itself, along with a decent user's manual and
an S-Video cable.
The card also ships with some
useful software. Besides the obligatory drivers CD,
full versions of the excellent PowerDVD 3.0 and ULead Video
Studio 4 are included. There is also a CD containing
and .AVI collection form Idea Box and a sampling of drivers
and utilities from MSI, including their 3D Turbo utility.
The
Card, it's Drivers and Other
Features
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