Introduction

Finally!

FiringSquad, like many other online sites, had a GeForce3 Preview article ready when NVIDIA officially launched the chip late last month.

Also like other sites, our preview was only half finished since we didn't have benchmarks. It took almost a month, but our GeForce3 evaluation board finally arrived late last week.

We won't bore you by regurgitating the GeForce3 information we've already covered. We suggest that you check out our original preview if you don't know about vertex and pixel shaders, Quincunx anti-aliasing, or anything else that makes the GeForce3 special.

You should consider this article to be a supplement to our original preview. For this article, we just have numbers (a lot of numbers) and a few Quake 3 FSAA comparison pictures.

GeForce3 Reference Board

Test System Setup

Intel Pentium 3 700MHz
AMD Athlon "Thunderbird" 1.1GHz

ASUS CUSL2-C (815EP)
ABIT KT7A-RAID (KT133A)

256MB Corsair PC133 CAS2 SDRAM

NVIDIA Reference 64MB DDR GeForce3
Driver version Detonator 11.01

ELSA GLADIAC 64MB DDR GeForce2 Ultra
Driver version Detonator 11.01

Leadtek WinFast 32MB DDR GeForce2 GTS
Driver version Detonator 11.01

AFREEY 12X DVD-ROM
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows 98 SE

Benchmarks

Quake 3 Retail 1.17 - 640x480 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail 1.17 - 800x600 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail 1.17 - 1024x768 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail 1.17 - 1280x960 Fastest, High Quality
Quake 3 Retail 1.17 - 1600x1200 Fastest, High Quality

MDK2 - 800x600x16
MDK2 - 800x600x32
MDK2 - 1024x768x16
MDK2 - 1024x768x32

Evolva Bumpmapping Demo - 800x600x16
Evolva Bumpmapping Demo - 800x600x32
Evolva Bumpmapping Demo - 1024x768x16
Evolva Bumpmapping Demo - 1024x768x32

Serious Sam, auto-demoMP0002 - 800x600x16
Serious Sam, auto-demoMP0002 - 800x600x32
Serious Sam, auto-demoMP0002 - 1024x768x16
Serious Sam, auto-demoMP0002 - 1024x768x32

Notes

We used both a P3-700 and an Athlon 1.1GHz for our tests. We ran all benchmarks without FSAA, with 2x FSAA, 4x FSAA, and Quincunx FSAA when possible.

We wanted to use 3DMark 2001 in our tests, but we encountered inconsistent benchmark results. We also encountered those same inconsistencies in 3DMark 2000. We've found a workaround that seems to give reproducible numbers, but we've chosen to omit the Mad Onion benchmarks just to be on the safe side. As a result, Evolva is our only D3D benchmark. Quake 3, MDK2, and Serious Sam are all OpenGL. Yes, we know that Unreal Tournament is D3D, but we've already established that UT is too CPU dependent to be a useful graphics benchmark.

We have an enormous number of graphs, and we'll have an occasional comment or two, but don't expect more than that since we don't want to be redundant; most observations can apply to multiple graphs, even across game titles and processors.