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ECTS 2000
By Kurt "Froglips" Giesselman
COMBATSIM.COM European Bureau ChiefnVIDIA:
Next stop on my tour was nVIDIA. The demand for meetings with nVIDIA was so high that they were combining groups. I was scheduled in with a German and a Dutch writer. I was imagining a fairly entertaining linguistic exercise with not much being accomplished but much to my surprise I had Alain Tiquet, Marketing Director, all to my self. After Alain and I determined that my French skills were still marginal we switched to discussing nVIDIA’s newest technology, the GeForce2Ultra.
Fig.15
The GeForce2Ultra is first video card to ship with 230mHz DDR memory (a blazing 460mHz effective clock speed). The GeForce2 GPU has been increased to a 250mHz clock speed. The card breaks the one gigapixel per second throughput barrier. I asked Alain if I would see a significant performance advantage over a GeForce2GTS overclocked to a 240 mHz core with the memory overclocked to 405mHz (the maximum speed that I have been able to push my Hercules 3D Prophet 2 64mb). He stated that the Ultra is the next generation of their 0.18 micron chip architecture and that nVIDIA’s improvements in design, not simply overclocking the GTS, were responsible for the increased clock speed and performance. Alain predicted that I would easy be able to see a significant improvement in frame rates over my six month old GTS. NVIDIA’s target of introducing new technology at a Moore’s Law squared pace continues to be on track.
Equally interesting was the GeForce2MX. With the price of computers well below US$1000 many people have trouble spending the near US$500 MSRP for an Ultra. The ‘MX’ flavor of the GeForce family provides all the gaming features of the GTS and Ultra at a significantly lower price point. An additional feature of the new MX series is the potential for two monitors to be connected using nVIDIA’s TwinView architecture. This is a highly desireable feature in the workstation market that can provide some very interesting uses with some games. Both the Ultra and the MX include an onboard High-Definition Video Processor to turn your PC into a HDTV receiver/player.
Expect reviews of the Ultra and MX boards in the near future.
