Creative Labs GeForce Pro - Page 2
Review by Jason King

Performance
I used three systems to benchmark the card each with a Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 TNT2, GeForce Pro and a Voodoo3 3000 as well as 3 different class CPU's so everyone can get a feel of how the GeForce Pro DDR would run on your computer.

Benchmarking Configuration:

Hardware:

Computer 1

AMD Athlon 700mhz CPU
MSI 6167 Mainboard
128 MB Apacer Pc-100 SDRAM
Diamond Monster Mx300 soundcard
Maxtor 9 GB 5400rpm HDD

Computer 2

Intel Pentium 3 600 E
Abit BE-6 2 Mainboard
Iwill Slocket 2
128 MB Hyundai 8ns Pc-100 SDRAM
Diamond Monster Mx300 soundcard
9GB WD 72000rpm HDD (UDMA 66)

Computer 3

Intel Celeron 533
Abit slocket
Abit BX6 2.02
128 MB Apacer 7ns Pc-100 SDRAM
SoundBlaster Live Value
9 GB WD 72000rpm HDD (UDMA 66)

Software:

Drivers:

  • GeForce, and GeForce Pro Cards used nVidia reference drivers version 3.68.
    *Please note that the Athlon does not utilise AGP 2x but rather 1x for stability reasons*
  • 3dfx V3 3000 used driver revision 1.03.05.
  • Diamond soundcards used Aureal Semiconductor reference driver's version win9x2040
  • Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live used the latest driver revisions.

Benchmarking Software:

  • Quake 3 retail version (Asia Pacific version)
    • High quality (32bit all options enabled eg Dynamic lighting, Lightmap, Full textures etc A3d enabled)
    • Normal (16 bit with Dynamic lighting disabled)
  • Quake 2 (Asia Pacific version) 3.20 patch
    • Crusher.dm2 (32 bit textures, full texture quality)
  • Unreal Tournament - retail version (Asia Pacific) using Direct 3D
    • High quality
    • Normal

System Software:

Win98 Special Edition used on all boxes, with DirectX 7.0a.

What are the numbers?

As you can see from the Quake 3 benchmarks, the jump from a TNT2 or V3 to a GeForce DDR really helps things a long by at least 25 frames per second. The image quality was also noticeably better on the GeForce than both the TNT2 and the V3 (no surprises here) since nVidia have included better support for True Trilinear filtering and extremely high polygon level counts that allow actual curved surfaces in Quake 3. The GPU also lives up to its name giving a result of almost 60 fps at 1024x768 on the Celeron system stuck at 66mhz FSB.

In the case of Unreal Tournament the card performs better in 32 bit D3D than the V3 does with 16 bit Glide, both looking better and playing faster. This is with all games straight out of the box, so patches and updates will definitely improve the performance.

I threw in the Quake 2 crusher scores to level everything out and to show that the video cards are the factors we are looking at and not the CPU's. Here the GeForce reins supreme even though T and L are not supported.

Next Page - Overclocking and conclusions