By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by Gainward CARDEXpert GeForce2 Pro/450 Golden Sample 64 MBytes 4.5 ns, AGP videocard.

Features:

• NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro chip, 200 MHz clock rate;
• 64 MBytes DDR SDRAM memory in eight EtronTech 4.5ns microchips, 225 (450) MHz clock rate , 128-bit bus;
• Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 880 megapixels/sec and 1760 megatexels/sec.

GeForce2 GTS was released in the spring of the year 2000, causing the squall of criticism due to relatively slow 166 MHz DDR memory already used in GeForce256. The GPU itself was considerably improved (one more texture module per pipeline, increased 200 MHz clock rate), but the memory bandwidth was insufficient. The fall of the same year brought the improved version of GeForce2 GTS called GeForce2 Pro. It differed from its brother with the faster 200 MHz memory. Certainly, the 32-bit color perfomance was significantly improved, but still 200 (400) MHz was not enough to show the full potential.

But the development of GeForce2 line was abruptly stopped after the release of GeForce3 with the strong memory optimization and without such a high RAM bandwidth requirement. GeForce2 Pro was finished with the release of GeForce2 Ti, putting the end of GeForce2 family. These cards currently get cheaper and cheaper, already costing less than $100. Moreover, the release of GeForce4 MX is called to finish the remnants of GeForce2 off. However there is still such a huge amount of these cards - both GeForce2 Pro, and GeForce2 Ti. So they'll remain in the market for a long time. They either replace GeForce2 MX400 if their price drops, or die. And even Gainward can't help it releasing faster card versions.

Wasn't overclocked.

For the 15th of February 2002 the latest drivers from NVIDIA are 27.30, 27.42 for Windows 9x/ME and 27.23, 27.30, 27.42 for Windows XP. As the drivers differences are equal for all GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ultra/Ti cards, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of these cards. See NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 64 MBytes 5ns section for more information about drivers.

And now I want to attract your attention to another important 3D feature - filtering. As many of you know, all chipsets support bilinear filtering that is an important instrument in MIP-mapping, some chipsets support trilinear filtering (true, not the approximation) and only few support anisotropic filtering.

Due to the fact that GeForce2 and GeForce3 do support anisotropic filtering, I recommend you to pay attention to the article concerning this feature.

There's no criticism about 3D quality in all the games tested. I want to mark perfect image quality and good speed in FSAA 2x2 and even 3x3:

You can compare screenshots with reference ones (NVIDIA GeForce3).

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	7	8	9	10	11	12
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18
NVIDIA GeForce2						-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	19	20	21	22	23	24
NVIDIA GeForce2		-		-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26	27	28
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list:

• 1. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
• 2. Unreal2 - for GeForce cards, Unreal - for all other
• 3. Comanche4
• 4. No One Lives Forever
• 5. Serious Sam
• 6. Colin McRAE Rally2
• 7. Red Faction
• 8. Rally Trophy
• 9. Sacrifice
• 10. Venom
• 11. Need For Speed V (Porshe 2000)
• 12. Real MYST
• 13. Blade of Darkness
• 14. Giants
• 15. 3DMark2001: Game1
• 16. 3DMark2001: Game2
• 17. 3DMark2001: Game3
• 18. 3DMark2001: Game4
• 19. 3DMark2001: Dot3
• 20. 3DMark2001: EMBM
• 21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders
• 22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders
• 23. Black & White
• 24. Undying
• 25. Anachronox
• 26. Max Payne
• 27. AquaNox
• 28. Serious Sam II

2D quality is outstanding. Soaping effects can be seen only on some low-quality monitors in 1600x1200x75 Hz. But there are some low-quality cards present that give soaping effect on good monitors. And I shall mark that 6.* version drivers are not compatible with the software for sound cards based on Yamaha processor, as well as with SoftXG100 software synthesizer. Start or Close Window buttons can be spoiled by some "garbage" in 2D mode.