NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS Roundup - July 2000

64 MB

Also investigated a few weeks ago was the 64 MB GeForce 2 GTS. This review, which served as an introduction to 64 MB GeForce 2 GTS based cards, found that the S3TC compression introduced in NVIDIA's 5.xx series drivers all but killed the current need for 64 MB GeForce solutions. Before S3TC was an option for GeForce owners, AGP texturing was a major problem in the world of high resolution 3D rendering. Having to travel over the extremely slow AGP pipeline for storage space when the on-card memory was full all but killed the ability to play games in resolutions of 1024x768x32 and above when a scene required complex textures. The interim solution was the production of the 64 MB GeForce 256, which proved to alleviate this problem by increasing the on-card storage space and thus ridding the problem of AGP texturing.

Times changed, however, and NVIDIA came up with a new way to solve the texturing problem: S3TC compression. Rather than adding storage space to the card itself, why not shrink the amount of data that needs to be stored? NVIDIA was able to pull it off with their 5.xx series drivers and thus was able to eliminate the problem of AGP texturing without adding expensive DDR SDRAM chips to cards.

As mentioned in the full 64 MB GeForce 2 GTS review, this form of texture compression will only be good for a limited time. As games become more and more detailed, textures will become larger and larger, filling up the 32 MB of on-card memory, even while being compressed. In addition, games that do not support S3TC, a feature that has to be implemented by the game developers, are often crippled on systems with "only" 32 MB of on-card memory. With these two issues in mind, it seems that the 64 MB GeForce 2 GTS serves as the ideal solution for those who are concerned with maximum card longevity. Keep in mind, however, that the next NVIDIA release is not far off, meaning that speed will be increased even more. For more information on this topic, check out our NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 64 MB review.

64 MB GeForce 2 GTS cards are included in this roundup. They are not included to be compared with the 32 MB cards, but rather to provide a comprehensive roundup of all GeForce 2 GTS based cards. In the conclusion we will pick the best GeForce 2 GTS based card from each memory configuration.