The Fastest GeForce2 GTS Card — Gainward’s CARDEXpert GeForce2 GTS/400 — THG.RU

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Introduction

It’s now a few months since NVIDIA released their latest high-end 3D chip by the name of GeForce2 GTS, which currently marks the top of the crop in the world of 3D-accelerators. The ‘GTS’ stands for ‘giga texel shader’ and is supposed to put some emphasis on the big numbers that this chip is able to produce. Its fill rate reads 800 million pixels per second and the texel fill rate boasts even 1.6 billion pixels per second. However, as impressive as those numbers sound, I mentioned my doubts about their validity in the real world already when I reviewed the first card with this chip two months ago. Since this time I have done a whole lot of testing in several different configurations and I will publish my findings along with the real fill rate numbers of 3dfx’s new Voodoo5 5500 card in an upcoming article.

GeForce2 GTS Suffers Badly From Memory Bandwidth Limitation

I don’t think that I am telling you a secret when let you know that the powerful GeForce2 GTS chip is badly suffering from the standard memory that is used with it. Only the two VSA-100 chips on the Voodoo5 5500 have even more problems with their surrounding memory. However, in case of the GeForce2 GTS card the chip clock and the memory clock are not tied together, which leaves the option to run the memory at higher speeds while leaving the chip clock alone. Unfortunately this used to be sad theory so far, because it turned out to be easier overclocking the chip than overclocking the memory. Increasing the chip clock is completely pointless however, since GeForce2 GTS is already stalled by its memory and won’t deliver more performance unless the memory bottleneck has been removed. Please have a read of the 3D benchmarking article, to fully understand this issue.

Gainward / Taiwan — Looking For A New Friend In The 3D Chip Arena

You might have heard of Gainward and their ‘Cardex’ products before or you might as well ask ‘Gain … what?’ This Taiwanese graphics cards and motherboard maker used to be a close friend of S3 and so all its past products were based on the 3D-chips of this company. Now, since VIA has taken over most of S3’s graphics business, Gainward is feeling a bit lonely. In the past NVIDIA wasn’t exactly interested to do business with them and now there’s hardly any other chipmaker left anymore.

Gainward Gives GeForce2 GTS What It Really Needs — 64 MB Of Fast Memory

Gainward knocked at NVIDIA’s door and decided to make cards with GeForce2 GTS and other NVIDIA chips. To get some attention in the tough 3D-card market Gainward had to do something rather special. It moved completely away from its old image as a provider of cost effective low-end 3D cards and went for the production of the fastest 3D card that money can buy right now. The trick is not too difficult. After looking closely at the memory problems and thus the performance restrictions of GeForce2 GTS Gainward made the decision to equip this chip with some really fast memory.

EliteMT supplied Gainward with 5 ns DDR SDRAM chips, which found their way on Gainward’s upcoming 64 MB GeForce2 GTS card.

The CARDEXpert GeForce2 GTS/400

As already mentioned above, Gainward did not only equip GeForce2 GTS with the fastest DDR memory currently available, it also added another 32 MB to GeForce2 GTS’s standard amount of memory. Therefore the chip doesn’t only benefit from the much faster memory, but also from the larger memory size. The latter enables this card to run Direct3D applications at 1600×1200 and 32-bit color depth, it can do FSAA at higher resolutions than the 32 MB GeForce2 GTS versions and because the larger memory leaves more texture buffer, the card’s performance at high resolutions increases as well.

We received a prototype of this card, which came without special drivers, but NVIDIA’s latest reference driver rev. 5.30. A little software tool, called ‘Expertool Plus’ allowed to change the memory clock and the chip clock to values far beyond of what Powerstrip would allow.

The card ran at 200 MHz chip clock and 400 MHz memory clock by default, but we could do continuous testing at the above settings.

This card is supposed to become available in August for a street price of some hefty $400. Gainward is planning to include a software DVD-player, Drakan, Rollcage and 14 3D game demos as well as several multimedia utilities from CyberLink and InterVideo.

You can see in the picture of the card that Gainward is using NVIDIA’s reference design without any added features. The additional TV-in/out daughtercard known from NVIDIA’s reference cards can optionally be added for additional costs.

All in all this card has only one special thing to it, but this one is special indeed. With 5 ns DDR memory it will be able to blow away any other 3D-card that’s currently available. Let’s have a look at the benchmark scores.

Benchmark Setup

For the benchmark setup I decided to use our new Pentium III reference platform with Intel’s 815e chipset, the Asus CUSL2. I benchmarked the Gainward card at the fastest settings as well as the default settings and added benchmark results scored with a default GeForce2 GTS equipped with 64 and 32 MB, which run their 6 ns DDR memory at only 333 MHz.

Benchmark Results: Quake 3 Arena Demo001

Here you can nicely see the proof for the memory limitation of a default GeForce2 GTS card. Already at 400 MHz memory clock and with unchanged chip clock the Gainward card can leave the default cards quite far behind in high resolutions. Once the Gainward card is clocked at maximum settings it can score some hefty 23.7 fps more at 1600x1200x16-bit color. The 32 MB GeForce2 GTS is only at the highest resolutions lagging behind the 64 MB version at the same memory clock.

Things changed once we used 32-bit color. You can see that the excess memory clock of the Gainward card translates directly into frame rate. 70.6 fps at 1280×1024 and 32-bit color is quite an impressive score and way beyond the 44.6 fps scored by a default GeForce2 GTS with 32 MB memory.

Benchmark Results: Quake 3 Arena Demo001 — FSAA

FSAA is very sensitive to memory performance as well, so that the Gainward card can leave the competition behind even at 16-bit color.

Things get more obvious at 32-bit color, where you can again see that the higher memory clock of the Gainward card translates directly into frame rate.

Benchmark Results: Expendable

I agree with you that Expendable is a rather old game, but it’s still the best Direct3D benchmark available. The results are still very useful.

In 16-bit color the Gainward card can only score at 1600×1200. The frame rate at lower resolutions is limited by the platform/software.

In 32-bit color the differences are also only starting at resolutions beyond 1024×768. However, at 1600×1200 the Gainward card could score some hefty 23 fps more than a default 64 MB GeForce2 GTS, which is almost a 50% frame rate increase.

Benchmark Results: Expendable — FSAA

With FSAA the impact of the memory performance starts at lower resolutions already. Again the Gainward card is able to leave the default cards far behind.

32-bit color FSAA is as tough as it gets. While the 32 MB card isn’t able to display any FSAA at resolutions higher than 640×480, the 64 MB default GeForce is again at about 70% of the performance of the Gainward card at full speed once 1024×768 have been reached.

Summary

Gainward has certainly shown that it knows how to put its competition in the GeForce2 GTS card arena to shame. While most card makers concentrate on crazy cooling solutions for a GeForce2 GTS chip, which hardly benefits from overclocking whatsoever, Gainward stuck to a reasonable heat sink and added some kick-ass memory instead. The 5 ns DDR SDRAM from EliteMT makes the Gainward CARDEXpert GeForce2 GTS/400 up to 50% faster than its competitors at high resolutions and true color. However, this added performance comes for a price. So far 5 ns DDR memory is rare and very expensive. You may have to pay some 100 bucks more than for an average GeForce2 GTS card, which is also not exactly a bad performer.

Before some of you should get really excited about this card, I’d like to mention a few unanswered questions. As it seems to me, it’s not quite clear yet when and in which volume the card will actually be released. This is obviously depending heavily on the availability of 5 ns DDR SDRAM in volume. We also don’t know if all future CARDEXpert cards will be quite as overclockable as our sample. Gainward assured us however, that they guarantee 450 MHz memory and 220 MHz chip clock, which sounds very reasonable. Last but not least we should also not forget that NVIDIA will again have a new high-end chip coming out in the September/October time frame. This chip will most likely have overcome the current memory problems of GeForce2 GTS.

All in all I recommend Gainward’s CARDEXpert GeForce2 GTS/400 to all the ones of you who want to have the fastest 3D card right now and who are willing to pay a whole lot of money for it. Gamers who fancy 32-bit color and highest resolutions will not be disappointed. However, people who like added features and who don’t care quite as much about super high frame rates at high resolutions and color depths should probably save their hard earned money for other upgrades.