Quick Breakdown

Current card lineup: Geforce256, Geforce2 GTS, Geforce2 GTS Ultra, Geforce2 MX Est. Street Price Range: ($100-$500 USD) Pros: Killer Speed, Solid Driver Support, Super Fast, more card configurations than anyone else, deadly fast, low cost performance options, all around fastest mofo on the block, high potential overclockability, and it's just really fast Cons: Little DirectX 8 Support, poor DVD quality, 2d quality could be better, some Athlon board incompatibilities, poor visual quality using DXTC, some reports of people tweaking this card so fast that it tears a hole in the space time continuum and gets sucked back into the past. Future Cards: NV20 Recommended User: Gamer, Hard Core Gamer, Professional Gamer, Hardcore computer tweaker.

NVIDIA, the usurper. NVIDIA came from less than a stellar beginning to produce some of the finest cards on the planet. After dethroning 3dfx as the speed king and tearing some very large OEM contracts away from ATI, NVIDIA is the company to watch. The company's stock soars while many in the high-tech community compare it to Intel. Not only did NVIDIA steal the speed crown from 3dfx, it added some semi-innovative features at the same time. The real innovation has been done by NVIDIA's marketing who are legendary for their underhanded tactics, and ability to get the public excited about their new features. Still, the Geforce256 and its siblings are incredible pieces of engineering.

NVIDIA does not make video cards, only video chips which it sells to various board manufactures. This allows NVIDIA to be more flexible then their competition. Asus makes a multimedia version, Hercules make an overclocker version and a budget version. Creative bundles more software. Then competition between these companies forces the price down and more people buy NVIDIA-powered products--we all win (well, maybe everyone but 3dfx).

While the Geforce family may have been out-classed in the features department by the Radeon, the Geforce certainly stomps the Radeon at low resolutions. At high resolutions they're very close, with the exception of the Geforce2 Ultra which makes everything else it's bitch (unfortunately it's not currently shipping and it costs 66% more than it's competitors, but hey, it's only money and you'll enjoy the bragging rights for weeks). The Geforce also lags behind in DVD acceleration and 2D image quality. It certainly doesn't do a bad job in either of these fields, it just isn't up to par with Matrox and ATI. So if you spend your day looking at an Excel document, and play Quake on your lunch break, this is not the card for you.

However, if you want the highest frame rates at all resolutions and like the features this card provides, (I'll expand on those features a little later), there is no better card this one from NVIDIA.

The Hard Stuff

A brief list of features can be found on Anandtech. Go to this article of his for a full in-depth review of all the features

• AGP 4x/2x with Fast Writes
• Four new Hypertexel pipelines process two texture per pixel, in true color, at full speed up to 1.6 Gtexel fill rate
• Built-in 32 MB high speed DDR video memory with up to 5.3 GB/sec bandwidth
• Eight texture mapped, lit pixels per clock cycle
• Second generation Transform and Lighting (T&L) Engine
• Up to 25 million triangles per second at peak rates
• Optimized for Direct3D acceleration with complete support for DirectX 7 features such as multi-texturing, bump mapping, light maps, reflection maps, full scene anti-aliasing, trilinear and 8-tap anisotropic filtering (better than trilinear mipmapping)
• Fully 1.2 compliant OpenGL support
• 32-bit colors, Z/stencil buffer
• Multi-buffering (double, triple, quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback
• Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
• Integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC supporting from 640x480 up to 2048x1536 in true color
• BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) support
• Video acceleration for Direct Show and MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo

NVIDIA has the same problem as all other video companies; actually getting their card's features into games. Though its list of features is not nearly as large as the Radeon (the above list uses the new NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer to cover many of ATI's supported features such as Dot-3 Bump mapping) it is impressive none the less.

The Geforce2 GTS uses .18 µm Process Technology, and has two texture units with four rendering pipelines each. The core/memory speed varies by the card and by the manufacturer but as an example, the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS has a core/memory speed of 200/166MHz. As such, the 3D Prophet II GTS can process up to 25 million triangles/s and 1.6-GigaTexels/s. In an ideal world, however, memory bandwidth problems hold the Geforce2 GTS back from its true potential.

Overclocking
NVIDIA's cards have always been at the top end when it comes to overclocking. Most video card companies that use NVIDIA products provide their own tools for overclocking your card (to be used at your own risk of course). Since the core/memory clocks exist independent of each other you can set each on as high as possible and squeeze every last possible frame out of your card. A market even exists full of ramsinks and heatsinks for the video processor to let you go that extra bit.

Bottom Line
It's all about the speed baby. You can't go wrong with a Geforce2 GTS for games. Its fast stable drivers, and its untouchable raw fill rate have made NVIDIA number one in the high-end 3D gamer department.

On to: 3dfx