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Chipset Comparison
Here, we're just going to quickly take a look at the major differences between the 2 chipsets that power these 2 cards from PowerColor. Both of these include a new second-generation hardware transform and lighting processor and includes the new NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer, along with the usual features found in most 3D accelerators these days. Both chipsets are built on a .18 micron process.
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Geforce2 GTS |
Geforce2 MX |
| Fill rate |
800-Mpixels, 1.6-Gtexels |
350-Mpixels, 700-Mtexels |
| Rendering Pipelines |
4 capable of 1 pixel with 2 textures per clock |
2 capable of 1 pixel with 2 textures per clock |
| Memory |
32MB/64MB DDR video memory |
32MB SDR video memory (possible DDR implementation in future) |
| Performance |
25 million triangles/second |
20 million triangles/second |
| Core Clock |
200MHz |
175MHz |
| Memory Clock |
333MHz (DDR) |
166MHz |
We should expect the Geforce2 GTS card to pull ahead of the Geforce2 MX card significantly, especially in higher resolutions such as 1280x1024 or 1600x1200--the Geforce2 GTS card simply has more muscle than the MX card.
Test Configuration
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Test System |
| CPU |
AMD Athlon ("Classic") 650MHz |
| Motherboard |
ASUS K7M (AMD "Irongate" 751) |
| Memory |
192MB "Generic" PC100 SDRAM |
| Video |
PowerColor PowerGene Geforce2 GTS
PowerColor PowerGene Geforce2 MX
PowerColor Sniper2 Riva TNT2 Pro |
| Hard Drive |
Quantum Fireball Plus LM 30GB |
| Sound |
Sound Blaster Live! Value |
| CD-ROMs |
Panasonic 24X
Acer CD-RW 6x2x2x |
| Network |
Realtech 10BaseT Network Interface Card |
| Windows |
Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (4.10.2222 A) |
| Drivers |
NVIDIA Detonator 3 Reference drivers (version 6.18)
Creative Live!Ware 3.0 for Windows 9x
AMD AGP Miniport Drivers 4.71 |
All tests were run on a clean installation of Windows 98 Second Edition with all drivers installed. No other programs were left running in the background while tests were running, no screen savers or power saving features were configured and the mouse was left still for the entire duration of the benchmark.
A quick note: I had to run the 2 Geforce2 cards at AGP 1X setting because there are some compatibility problems with all Geforce/Geforce2 cards with non-Intel motherboard chipsets. Forcing AGP 2X only gave me a marginal performance improvement but also prevented all tests from finishing because of stability problems.
 On to: Benchmark Results - 3DMark2000
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