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Ever since they first
introduced the GeForce line of GPU's,
nVidia
has made it clear that they live by their motto,
"We Want to Push Every Pixel on the Planet". With
ever improving models being produced at a feverish
pace, they have made it clear to their competition
that they are the dominating force to be reckoned
with. By setting deadlines for newer
products and executing with precision, the
competition began to lose ground. This year alone
we've seen the demise of such veterans as 3DFX and
S3, leaving
nVidia,
ATi and
Matrox as the
only major players still standing. Todate, with the
success of the famed GeForce 2 GPU and the
impending GeForce 3, it's fairly safe to say that
nVidia has taken the lead of the video
card
market.
Today, nVidia officially releases two more
chipsets, the GeForce 2 MX-200 and GeForce 2
MX-400. We'll be taking a look at the MX-400 and
comparing it to an original GeForce 2 MX and
GeForce 2 Ultra. According to Brian Burke
at nVidia, the goal of the new MX chipsets
is to allow OEMs to offer a quality graphics
solution at an affordable price. The
expected M.S.R.P. of the GeForce 2 MX-200 is $99,
while the GeForce 2 MX-400 will be $129. Using
the new GeForce 2 MX chipsets, video card
manufacturers should be able to provide
an economical video card that is capable of
running today's games as well as tomorrow's.
Unfortunately, I
believe offering an additional 2 versions of the
MX is going to seriously confuse the average user,
so I've outlined the basic differences between the
three cards.
|
Model |
Memory
Bandwidth |
Fill Rate |
Memory Options |
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GeForce2 MX 400 |
2.7GB/sec. |
400M pixels/sec.,
800M texels/sec. |
64/32MB of either
64-bit DDR or 128-bit SDR RAM |
GeForce2 MX |
2.7GB/sec. |
350M pixels/sec.,
700M texels/sec. |
64/32MB of either
64-bit DDR or 64/128-bit SDR RAM |
GeForce2 MX 200 |
1.3GB/sec. |
350M pixels/sec.,
700M texels/sec. |
64-bit SDR RAM |
Let us go ahead and take a look at the MX-400's
specifications and see what it brings to the
table. Then we'll pit it against it's older
brothers, the GeForce 2 MX and GeForce 2 Ultra.
With these comparisons we'll be able to see just
where this new line of MX GPU's fall in the
GeForce 2 spectrum.
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| Specifications
Of The nVidia GeForce 2 MX-400 |
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Somethings different... |
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3D Features
- Nvidia 2nd
Generation 256-bit Geforce2 MX-400 GPU
- Integrated
2nd generation T&L engine
- 400M
pixels/sec.
-
800
Mtextel Fill Rate
- 20M
triangles/sec setup
- Nvidia
QuadEngine Technology
- Order
independent Full Scene Multisample
Anti-aliasing
- 32-bit
color with 32-bit z/stencil
- DirectX
and S3TC texture compression
High
performance 256-bit 2D acceleration
- Optimized
for multiple color depths including 32,
24, 16, 15 and 8-bit per pixel
- True color
hardware cursor
- Multi-buffering
(double, triple, quad buffering) for
smooth animation and video
Video
playback
- Enhanced
Motion Compensation for full screen
video playback of all DVD/HDTV
resolution
- Video
acceleration for DirectShow, Mpeg 1,
Mpeg 2, and indeo
- 8:1 up
scaling and downscaling
- Multiple
video windows with hardware color space
conversion and filtering
OS support
- Windows
95/OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 2000,
Windows NT
- Linux
XFree86 4.0.1 (RedHat 6.1)
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By increasing the core GPU clock speed from
175MHz, to 200MHz, the GeForce 2 MX-400 can offer
a theoretical increase in fill rates of 14% versus the
standard MX chip.
Whether that increase will have a major effect on
performance compared to the original MX will be
determined by the benchmarks later on. Quality
and Installation
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