By Tikkler - September 8, 2000

From the beginning of the original Riva TNT's existence back in 1998, NVIDIA had begun to stake out its claim to the world as the dominant player in consumer graphics accelerators. With the release of the Riva TNT2 processor, which was just an improved version of the original Riva TNT, NVIDIA once again showed the world its raw power in 3D graphics acceleration. With the lack of 32-bit 3D rendering in 3dfx's newest offering, the Voodoo3, NVIDIA's chance to show the world the power of its products opened; needless to say, their efforts were mainly successful and shifted power from 3dfx to their own hands in the hearts of the consumers.

As time progressed, they increased the speed of their TNT2 processor to release the Riva TNT2 Ultra, which pushed levels of performance up even higher and helped NVIDIA stake out its claim as the leader in high-end graphics acceleration. Then came the TNT2 M64, a trimmed-down version of the TNT2, which was intended for the low-end sector of the market. By this time, NVIDIA seemed to gain an edge in all these 3 sectors of the market with these 3 versions of their successful Riva TNT2 chipset.

Fast forward to the year 2000, skipping the original Geforce256 chipset, the first-ever GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) featuring an all-new hardware transform & lighting engine for taking load off of the CPU. It's been about half a year since NVIDIA first introduced their Geforce2 GTS GPU, boasting an improved core with a second-generation hardware Transform & Lighting engine and a new per-pixel shading architecture dubbed the NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer; this processor is truly a graphics powerhouse. With a default core clock of 200MHz and a memory clock of 333MHz (DDR memory), the Geforce2 GTS can process an amazing 25 million polygons per second.

Then came the Geforce2 MX, targeted for the mainstream market, or low-end gamer, much like the TNT2 M64 was to the TNT2. It boasts all the features of the Geforce2 GTS processor such as the second-generation hardware transform & lighting engine, but at a slower speed with less rendering pipelines. The Geforce2 MX runs at a core speed of 175MHz with a memory speed of only 166MHz (SDR memory), this processor can process 20 million polygons per second, 5 million less than its sibling, the Geforce2 GTS.

A few weeks ago, NVIDIA released their Geforce2 Ultra GPU, which boasts an improved core with a higher core clock speed and memory clock to push performance even higher. This processor once again give NVIDIA a claim that it has a product for all sectors of this market, from high-end (Geforce2 Ultra), to mid-range (Geforce2 GTS), to low-end or mainstream (Geforce2 MX), much like how they did with the TNT2 line of products.

Nevertheless, I'm not going to go into the specifics of the features of all these processors in this review as it's not specifically about the chipsets. There are many sites out there who have very detailed information about these chipsets, so I'm going to save myself some time and just leave this much-repeated information out of this review. We're here today to review the PowerColor incarnations of 2 of these high-performance graphics processors, their PowerGene Geforce2 GTS and PowerGene Geforce2 MX video cards.

On to: PowerColor PowerGene Geforce2 GTS