nVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Ultra and Detonator 3 Drivers!

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
8/14/00

Our Test System An i815 with a mid range processor

LiteOn Mid Tower ATX Case w/ 300W PS, Pentium III 866EB,  Abit SE6 i815 Motherboard and nVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Ultra 64MB AGP Card, 128MB of PC133 True CAS2 SDRAM from Corsair (thanks Outside Loop), IBM 15Gig 7200 RPM ATA100 Hard Drive (thanks again Outside Loop), Kenwood 72X CDROM,
Win 98SE, DirectX 7.0a, nVidia reference drivers version 6.16

Benchmarks / Comparisons Good God! What did you do to this thing?

OpenGL Benchmarks:

Now for the acid test, a flat out drag race with no FSAA in Quake 3 with 32 bit color and High Quality settings.

We didn't want to create too much of an eye chart here but for the record, 1600X1200X32 ran at a beautiful 59 fps on the GeForce2 Ultra with the Det 3 drivers.  The GeForce2 64MB card with the older 5.32 drivers, came in at 33.2 and the Radeon and V5 at 35.6 and 30.4 respectively.  Again, when you hit 800X600X32 and above, the GeForce2 Ultra with the Det.3 Drivers, leaves the others in the dust.

OpenGL FSAA Performance - Further investigation:

Let's look at Quake 3 FSAA frame rate with all of the new settings we have available in the Det.3 drivers.

Here we see the impact of the varying levels of FSAA on the GeForce2 Ultra.  What is important to note is that we have now broken well past the 30 fps mark at 1024X768X32 with decent 4X FSAA on the GeForce2 platform.  The 800X600X32 scores are fantastic at 53 fps and it looks good.  Not as good as 1024X768X32 mind you but it is not bad at all.

Over-clocked Performance,
Det 3 GeForce2 Benefits and The Rating