By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by SUMA Platinum GeForce2 Pro 64 MBytes 5.5 ns, AGP videocard.

Features:

• NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro chip, 200 MHz clock rate;
• 64 MBytes DDR SDRAM memory in eight Hyundai 5.5ns microchips, 183 (366) MHz clock rate , 128-bit bus;
• Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 800 megapixels/sec and 1600 megatexels/sec.

When GeForce2 GTS with relatively slow 166 MHz DDR memory appeared almost a year ago, many reviewers said have marked that these unbalanced cards are temporary phenomena and have began waiting for cards with faster memory. This period has lasted for several months and the first examples of these cards have appeared in the Fall'2000 only. According to expectations, the faster 200 MHz DDR memory had greatly boosted the perfomance and these cards have been named "Pro". Their price has been higher than that of previous GeForce2 products. In spite of the "Pro" suffix, actually it's the same GeForce2 GTS chip with the same 200 MHz clock rate. Despite NVIDIA's recommendations about 64 MBytes memory for these cards, some manufacturers try to release both 32 MBytes and 64 MBytes (with slightly slow 5.5ns memory) variants. This made these cards popular until the moment of mass production of "real" 64 MBytes 5ns Pro cards, thus their 5.5ns analogues "waned", taking into account very slightly decreasing price.

Wasn't tweaked.

For the 20th of September'2001 the latest drivers from NVIDIA are 8.04, 8.05, 14.40 and 14.61. As the drivers differences are equal for all GeForce2 GTS/Pro/Ultra cards, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of these cards. See NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro 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.

I also advise you to read about S3TC influence on speed and perfomance, because S3TC realization in OpenGL is important nowadays, and it shows good results.

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 taken on this card with reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Games / Cards	25	26
NVIDIA GeForce 2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list:

• 1. Quake3
• 2. Unreal
• 3. Unreal Tournament
• 4. No One Lives Forever
• 5. Serious Sam
• 6. Colin McRAE Rally2
• 7. American McGee's Alice
• 8. Mercedes Benz Truck Racing
• 9. Sacrifice
• 10. F.A.K.K. 2
• 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

2D quality is outstanding. There's no critisism up to 1600x1200x75 Hz. Soaping effects can be seen only on some low-quality monitors in 1600x1200. 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.