The could be THE Geforce 2 video card to get
Written: Jun 10 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good performance, good price
Cons: Lack of TV out, Software bundle is run of the mill
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| stevelarrison's Full Review: Creative Technology 3D Blaster Annihilator2, (32 M... |
Nvidia is on a roll. With the release of the Geforce 2 chipset, they have upped the standard for other 3d graphics companies to meet. Since the announcement in late April of the Geforce 2 chipset, a slew of companies have announced Geforce 2 based products. With the number of announcements of Geforce 2 cards coming out, how is the consumer to deside which card to get?
It is all in the chipset
As discussed in more detail in my review titled "These days, it is all in the chipset", the choice of a video card can be made much easier if you look past the marketing hype, and just concentrate on the chipset being used for a particular graphics card. There is a simple reason for this. With radical new graphics chipsets being introduced every 6 months, graphics boards companies do not have time to design individual products, instead, the commonly use what is referred to as a "referrence design". In other words, in spite of any marketing hype, all graphics cards of a given chipset type are the same. The only differences between products are price and bundled games/software.
You stated that this may be the ideal Geforce 2, why?
In a word, price. The retail list price of all Geforce 2 video cards introduced in the past month has been the same - $349. Until Creative Labs introduced the Annihilator 2. Their strategy is simple. Compete on price. The list on this card is $299. To me, a price savings is more important than bundled games, but for the record, the software bundle offered with the Annhilator 2 is pretty lame. It consists of : Enhanced BlasterControl 4.0, LAVA! Music Video Player, Media Ring Talk, E-Color Colorific, 3Deep, Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS Demo. Since these are generic things that Creative Labs bundles with just about everything they sell, the desiding factor on buying the Creative Labs card over another manufacturers should be the $50 price savings vs the software bundled with a competing product. If say, the games offered with an Asus 7700 are attractive to you, price them. If you can get them for less than $50, get the Creative Labs cards and the games independently, if you can't then get the Asus 7700. They are the same card, you can't go wrong.
The Spec
No escaping one of my reviews without seeing some technical data, so here goes, it is standard for a Geforce 2 based Video card.
Powered by the GeForce 2 GTS - the worlds first gigatexel shading GPU from NVIDIA
Advanced 256-bit graphics architecture
AGP 4X with Fast Writes support
Hardware full-scence anti-aliasing (FSAA)
NVIDA Shading Rasterizer (NSR) - multi-operation single pass rasterizer
32MB of Double Data Rate (DDR) memory effectively operating at 333 MHz
5.3 GB/sec of dedicated graphics memory bandwidth
Four independent pixel pipelines capable of rendering up to 8 texels per clock cycle to deliver fill rates of up to 1.6 Gigatexels per second
2nd-generation transform and lighting (T&L) engines processes up to 25 million triangles per second
Optimized Direct3D and OpenGL acceleration with comprehensive support
Advanced per-pixel, perspective-correct texturing including per-pexel shading and lighting, cube environment mapping, per-pixel bump mapping, light and reflection maps and texture compression (DXTC, S3TC)
High performance 2D, GUI, and DirectDraw
Screen resolutions of up to 2048x1536 optimized for 32, 16 and 8-bit per pixel color depths
Flicker free refresh rates up to 240Hz
Video Advanced digital video processing for DirectShow, MPEG1, MPEG2
Enhanced motion compensation for full screen, full motion video playback
Multi-tap bilinear video scaling and filtering
Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering
DVD sub-picture alpha blended compositing
The only thing truly of note is the lack of TV-Out. If this feature is important to you, do not get this video card.
Summary
The Geforce 2 is one of the best graphics cards available today. (People into 3d FPS games will like the Geforce 2 better, people into Flight Simulation and Racing games will like the Voodoo 5 5500 better). You Reailly can't go wrong choosing a Geforce 2 video card since they are all the same, and they are all nice. The $50 price savings is attactive, but the lack of TV out, and compelling software bundle is disturbing.
Recommended:
Yes
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stevelarrison
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Member: Steve Larrison
Location: Scottsdale, Az. USA
Reviews written: 171
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