Source: http://www.firingsquad.com/
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The GeForce 2 GTS release really caught us by surprise. We knew it was coming, but had no idea it would be this soon. Everyone knows that the graphics industry runs on a six month product cycle. Given that the original GeForce 256 became widely available in October and November of last year, the May GeForce 2 launch shouldn't be a surprise. It's been seven months, right?
We assumed that NVIDIA would take its time in releasing the next product. The GeForce 256 has been the market darling for over six months now, and the card's main competitor, 3dfx's Voodoo 5, isn't even on store shelves yet. When a company is in a market dominating position, you would figure that it could rest for a little while, take a little breather, and hold off on releasing a new product until it's needed.

Eye of the Tiger
NVIDIA isn't that kind of company. After talking with NVIDIA's Derek Perez and Rich Black at GDC, we could see that NVIDIA is still hungry. Even after the successful IPO, and the Microsoft X-Box deal, NVIDIA isn't going to take a break.
NVIDIA has learned from 3dfx's mistakes. The company is on top right now, but everyone knows that they're just one missed product cycle away from second place. NVIDIA is releasing the GeForce 2 next month, just in time to take on 3dfx's Voodoo 5. NVIDIA is sticking to the six month cycle. This is a clear message to all the other graphics companies: if you want to compete in this industry, you're going to have to play on NVIDIA's terms.

Today we have a preview of NVIDIA's new GeForce 2 GTS. In case you were wondering, GTS stands for Gigatexel Shader. The original GeForce board had a 480 Mtexels/s fill rate. The GeForce 2 GTS has a 1.6Gtexels/s fill rate. Read on to find out what else has changed and how the GeForce 2 performs!

The List
GeForce 2 GTS GPU
0.18 micron manufacturing process
2nd generation T&L engine
25 million triangles/s
32MB DDR SDRAM
200MHz core clock
166MHz memory clock
Per-pixel shader
Per-pixel dot product 3 bump mapping
Per-pixel lighting and shading
Hypertexel architecture
Quad pixel pipeline
Two textures per pixel
800 Mpixels/s fill rate
1.6 Gtexels/s fill rate
1X/2X AGP, 4X AGP w/fast writes
32-bit rendering
32-bit textures
Z/Stencil buffer
DirectX texture compression
S3TC support
Cube Environment Mapping
Vertex Blending (2-matrix)
DX5, DX6, DX7, OpenGL 1.2 support
Hardware anti-aliasing
High definition video processor (HDVP)
Supports all 18 ATSC formats, including 720p and 1080i
350MHz RAMDAC

Notes
The GeForce 2 is a "spring refresh" part, but it looks like NVIDIA has put in a little more work. Most of the time, a "spring refresh" consists of the same chip with a higher clock speed and maybe a handful of minor new features. Yes, the GeForce 2 does sport a higher clock speed, but the improvements don't stop there.
As you may recall, the GeForce 256 GPU used the 0.22 micron manufacturing process. NVIDIA used a die-shrink to increase the clock speed. By switching to 0.18, NVIDIA was able to cut power dissipation in half and increase the core clock speed from 120MHz to 200MHz. NVIDIA also implemented a new HyperTexel architecture which added multi-texturing to each pixel pipeline. The original GeForce could only do one texture per pixel; the new GeForce 2 can do two textures per pixel.

These two pipeline and clock speed improvements account for a dramatic fill rate increase. The pixel fill rate jumps from 480Mpixels/s (4 pixel pipeline x 120MHz clock) to 800Mpixels/s (4 pixel pipeline x 200MHz clock). The texel fill rate jumps from 480Mtexels/s (4 pixel pipeline x 120Mhz clock x 1 texture per pixel) to 1.6Gtexels/s (4 pixel pipeline x 200MHz clock x 2 textures per pixel). This increase in fill rate is similar to the jump between the Voodoo 1 and the Voodoo 2. The Voodoo 2 basically doubled the clock speed of the Voodoo 1 and added multi-texturing.

More notes
The GeForce 2 also features S3TC and FSAA support. This isn't a surprise to most of you since these features have been available on the original GeForce ever since the 5.X detonators were leaked. NVIDIA wanted to save S3TC and FSAA for the GeForce 2, and planned to release the 5.X Detonators with the new card. Secrets don't get kept for very long in this industry.
The GeForce 2's triangle count has risen to 25 million triangles per second from the GeForce's paltry 15 million triangles per second. NVIDIA is also very big on per-pixel shading. We'll have more on this later.

Another new addition is the HDVP (High Definition Video Processor) which enables 720p and 1080i HDTV (High Definition Television) decode. Pick up a HDTV tuner card, and your monitor becomes a decent HDTV.

GeForce 2 GTS
The card itself is the same size as the original GeForce. Our card features 32MB of 6ns Infineon DDR SDRAM -just fast enough to meet the 166MHz requirements.

Remember Treemark?
Ah, the NVIDIA demos. As we all know, NVIDIA makes the best demos in the business, and they've really outdone themselves with the new GeForce 2 demos. Note that a few of these demos have been released earlier, but they were meant for the GeForce 2 launch.
Yes, the NVIDIA tree is back, and he's brought friends. Welcome to the NVIDIA Grove. Every single tree has its own set of fireflies. Since treemark only allowed you to add up to eight dynamic lights (the fireflies), people assumed that the GeForce could only do eight lights. NVIDIA wanted to make sure that everyone knows that the GeForce and GeForce 2 can handle far more than eight lights.

Lightning
The Lightning demo is also very impressive. The card performs per-pixel lighting on the surrounding metalwork as the lightning strikes the metal NVIDIA plate

Principles of Shading
The Principles of Shading demo does a very good job of explaining what the per-pixel shader actually does.

Test System
Intel Celeron 300A@450MHz(4.5x100MHz)
Intel P3-600E@600MHz(6.0x100MHz)
Iwill PPGA to Slot-1 adapter
Abit FC-PGA to Slot-1 adapter
Abit BE6-II motherboard
Apacer 128MB PC133 SDRAM

Western Digital Caviar ATA-66 hard drive


NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 32MB AGP
Driver version: Detonator 5.16

ASUS V6800 GeForce 256 32MB DDR
Driver version: Detonator 5.16

Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks
3DMark2000 - 800x600x16
3DMark2000 - 800x600x32
3DMark2000 - 1024x768x16
3DMark2000 - 1024x768x32

Quake 3 Retail - 512x384 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 640x480 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 800x600 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1024x768 Fastest, Normal, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail - 1600x1200 Fastest, Normal, High Quality

Notes
Yes, you read that right. NVIDIA gave us the new Detonator 5.16 drivers to play with. We decided to throw the GeForce 2 up against its little brother to see how much performance has improved. We're cooking up several Voodoo 5 comparisons for later, but we wanted to keep this preview in the family for now.
We decided to use the 5.16 drivers for both cards since we all know that the 5.X drivers smoke the 3.X drivers. We had to give the regular GeForce a figting chance. Sending it out with the 3.68s would have been like sending a lamb to slaughter.

Please don't ask us to send you the 5.16 drivers. NVIDIA made it clear that they are for editorial purposes only (which means they're probably out there somewhere).

3DMark2000








Notes
The GeForce 2 shows a very nice increase in performance in 3DMark. It isn't a Voodoo 1 to Voodoo 2 level jump, but the gain is respectable nonetheless. Several people have voiced memory bandwitdh concerns. Let's see if we can find anything in the Quake 3 benchmarks.

Quake 3 Fastest
demo001













Notes
Both GeForce cards seem to hit the same bottleneck at the low resolutions. The GeForce 2's fill rate helps the card pull away at 1280x1024. Would you like 70 frames per second at 1600x1200?

More benchmarks here, and here.


We finally see the GeForce 2's fill rate limitations in the High Quality tests. If you take a quick peek at our High Quality Quake 3 Voodoo 5 tests here, you can see that the 667Mpixels/667Mtexels V5 maxes out at close to 35.7fps at 1280x1024. The 800Mpixels/1.6Gtexels GeForce 2 maxes out at 41.8fps at the same resolution.

Loose ends
So how much is all of this going to cost? 32MB GeForce 2 DDR cards will probably retail for around $299. 64MB DDR cards will go for near $399. The GeForce 2 is compatible with SDR SDRAM as well as DDR, but most manufacturers will stick with DDR memory. Expect cards to reach store shelves in mid-May.
NVIDIA is also pushing PCI support, so we will probably see a couple PCI GeForce 2 cards on the market. Since most developers try to keep away from system memory at all costs, AGP 4X isn't very important, and PCI cards will probably perform just as well as the AGP versions in games that can keep everything in local memory.

The GeForce 2 looks like a good card. The per-pixel shading effects are simply amazing, but we'll have to wait a while for developers to take advantage of the GeForce's ability to do seven pixel operations in a single pass.

The GeForce 2's low resolution performance in Quake 3 is no better than the regular GeForce's, but it would be a crime to play at 640 fastest on the GeForce 2. This card can do 70 frames per second at 1600x1200. You can probably get that number closer to 90 with a little tweaking.

If you haven't noticed, we've reverted back to Quake 3 and 3DMark in most of our recent video card tests. We tested a few UT demos, but the CPU has too much of an effect on the game to make it an effective video card benchmark. We're in the process of selecting new games to benchmark. FiringSquad needs to find new game benchmarks that will be able to challenge all of these new cards. If you have any suggestions, feel free to mail them in