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I know by now about half of you have reread the specifications three times. You are thinking, "This bonehead made a typo in the most important specs for the card." Not so buckaroo. You are reading it correctly. This is currently the fastest card on the market by 10%. The first batch of 3D Prophet II 64mb video cards are clocked, out of the box, at 220mHz core and 366mHz memory. The hardware product manager from Guillemot told me that this first batch out of the chute was clocked at the higher speed even though the box lists the NVIDIA recommended clock speeds. The clock speed may be turned down for the next batch to market to the NVIDIA standard (200/333). He confirmed, which I already suspected from some quick calculations, that turning up the core clock would make little if any improvement in frame rates.

The key is in the memory. With four beautiful heatsinks in place, I had high hopes for big improvements in RAM speed. Sadly, it was not to be. The RAM ran out of stability at 405mHz, barely over 10% improvement. Funny thing is that the RAM runs cool to the touch at 405mHz twenty-four hours a day with the OEM heat sinks. The Cool Bits registry tweak didn't work with the newest .530 drivers. Since the newer drivers gave better graphics and speed I left them in and tweak with Power Strip.

I could talk techno babble for the next week about quad pipelines, improved T & L, NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer but who the heck cares. NVIDIA is leading the way towards the graphics future but today about half the feature set is not supported by any game I am aware of on the market. There are many games under development that will use these advanced features but most are first person shooter types. What we care about on Combat Sim is how the card works in our favorite sims.

Test system:

• PII 400mHz or Celeron II 566 o/c to 857mHz on 100mHz FSB
• 384mb 100mHz non-EEC memory
• 3D Prophet II 64mb DDR DVI
• Turtle Beach Systems Montego I
• Maxtor 40gb 7200 RPM drive on Iwill UltraDMA
• Nokia 447Xi

Let me start with Falcon 4.0. I removed a NVIDIA GeForce2GTS 32mb reference board to install the 3D Prophet II 64mb board. I did not change anything and launched Falcon 4.0 as soon as I booted up. I was simply astonished at the difference in the graphics I saw. This led to one of those rare all night vigils (which I am frankly far too old for) of swapping cards and testing different settings with different sims. During my conversations with the hardware product manager at Guillemot I had understood much more about how the FSAA modes worked for the NVIDIA based cards. That understanding had led me to some conclusions and revelations that I will share in the next section, 'Optimizing Your GeForce2GTS'.