By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by Gigabyte GV-GF1280-32E 32 MBytes AGP.

Features:

• NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 chip, 175 MHz clock rate;
• 32 MBytes SDR SDRAM memory in 4 EliteMT 5.5ns microchips, 183 MHz clock rate , 64-bit bus;
• Peak speed of scene drawing in multitexturing mode is 350 megapixels/sec and 700 megatexels/sec.

Overclocks to 220/200 MHz (see summary diagrams).

After the release of GeForce256 cards, NVIDIA representatives have began to understand that following releases wouldn't replace previous cards due to the short period between the new releases. Therefore it has been decided to build a so-called 'ladder' of the market niches, so that every accelerator would have belonged to one of them according its price and perfomance. The release of GeForce2 GTS has been marked by a much higher price for them than for any other of the previous cards. It has been meant that a cheap solution named GeForce2 MX would follow the release of more expensive variants to occupy a low cost niche and to replace more expensive and less faster GeForce256 cards. So, the Summer'2000 has brought us GeForce2 MX that is still very popular today.

But there are many old videocards like Riva TNT2/TNT2Pro on sale, and NVIDIA decided to release even more pared-down variant of GeForce2, which, besides SDR memory, has been implemented with 64-bit bus. This super slow GeForce2 MX was named 'GeForce2 MX200'. We are partly acquainted with perfomance of such 'castrated' cards on example of ASUS AGP-V7100 16 MBytes. It seems that release of 32 MBytes variant will be of little help to this artificially understated product. Read more about MX200/MX400 family in the Video section.

For the 20th of October'2001 the latest drivers from NVIDIA are 15.50, 20.80, 21.83 and 21.85. As the drivers differences are equal for all MX200 cards, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of these cards. See NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 32 MBytes section for more information about drivers.

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

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	7	8	9	10	11	12
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200						-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	19	20	21	22	23	24
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200		-		-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list:

• 1. Quake3 Arena
• 2. Unreal2 - for GeForce cards, Unreal - for all other
• 3. Unreal Tournament
• 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

I shall mark that these cards sometimes have Z-buffer working incorrectly in 32-bit mode when Z-buffer itself is 16-bit, what causes artefacts. Such problems were noticed on some games with Unreal Tournament engine. Thus I recommend you to use utilities like Riva Tuner for fine tuning, and pay attention to Direct3D settings of such games.

2D quality is very good for working with 21" monitors. Soaping effects can be seen only on some low-quality monitors in 1600x1200. And I shall mark that there are October be some incompatibilities of SUMA cards with a number of motherboards and monitors. And 6.* 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.