NVIDIA GeForce2/3 Titanium Roundup - January 2002

Performance

One can pretty much assume that all cards using the same NVIDIA core will perform on the same level. Since clock speeds of both the memory and the core are fairly regulated by NVIDIA, the vast majority of cards ship at the recommenced clock speed set forth by NVIDIA. Just to confirm that all cards were up to par and that no one card was drastically slower than another in a group, we benchmarked every card in Quake III Arena at 1024x768x32. We also benchmarked the cards in the maximum overclocked speed. The second number on the bar graph as well as the extension of the bar graph represent the performance obtained using the highest overclocked speed. The graphs below show what we found. Note that the graphs are grouped by GPU type.

GeForce2 Ti 200

Remember how we said that essentially all the cards within a group should perform the same? Well, this is still true and would be the case here if the Gainward GeForce2 Ti/450 card was not shipped at an overclocked speed of 260/472MHz. The additional 10MHz on the core and 72MHz on the memory clock give the Gainward card a welcome speed boost over other GeForce2 Ti cards out there.

When overclocked, the playing field gets leveled out some, with only the Visiontek Xtasy 5864 falling behind. The Gainward GeForce2 Ti/450 card is still able to outperform the competition by a small amount when overclocked thanks to its eagerness to overclock.

GeForce3 Ti 200

The GeForce3 Ti 200 cards all performed fairly similarly, with the Prolink PixelView GeForce3 Ti200 as the only card standing out. The Prolink card performed about 5% better out of the box than the other GeForce3 Ti200 cards did, most likely the result of having a newer or more optimized BIOS.

When overclocked, the Gainward GeForce3 Ti/450 was able to outperform the competition. Once again this can be attributed to the card's affinity towards overclocking.

GeForce3 Ti 500

As the graph shows, essentially all GeForce3 Ti 500 cards are created equal. The performance difference between the "slowest" GeForce3 Ti 500 and the "fastest" one was a tiny 0.05%.

When overclocked, the Prolink PixelView GeForce3 Ti500 was able to gain a tiny edge over the competition as a result of it's high clock speed.