NVIDIA GeForce 256 Part 1: To buy or not to buy

As we mentioned earlier, the memory bandwidth of the GeForce 256 at a memory clock of 166MHz will definitely be a limiting factor as the resolution increases especially when rendering in 32-bit color. One way around this is to overclock the memory frequency in order to increase the bandwidth. You can expect card manufacturers that ship their cards with 5ns memory to offer an overclocking utility of some sort that allows you to increase the memory clock which will help the most in high memory utilization scenarios (i.e. 32-bit color rendering) where memory bandwidth is critical.

The QuadPixel Rendering Engine of the GeForce 256 makes for interesting overclocking effects as well. Since the theoretical fill rate is calculated by multiplying the core clock speed by the four 64-bit pixel pipelines an increase of the core clock speed of 5MHz results in a 20M pixel/s increase in peak fill rate. The overclocking potential of the GeForce 256 core is not that great, the 0.22-micron process it is built on does not offer much room for growth and an overclock from the default 120MHz to 125MHz or 130MHz wouldn't be too great of a stretch. While a 5 or 10MHz overclock will help in games that are fill rate limited, the increase won't help when memory bandwidth is the limiting factor, in which case overclocking the memory will help more than overclocking the core.

If you are in the market for a GeForce, you'll want to get one with faster memory so you can eliminate as much of the possible bottleneck as you can.  A higher memory clock will generally offer a greater performance increase than a higher core clock in the case of the GeForce.

In terms of driver quality and support, the GeForce 256 is currently at the state the TNT2 was just before its release. Right now the GeForce 256 runs off of the TNT2's Detonator 2.08 drivers without a problem and shortly you'll see the release of the DirectX 7 compliant 3.4x drivers.

We ran our tests using the unreleased 3.47 drivers supplied by NVIDIA which worked for both the TNT2 and the GeForce 256. We'll be investigating performance advantages/disadvantages of the individual drivers in an article next week that more closely inspects the performance of the GeForce.

The drivers are a definite point that needs improvement for the GeForce. If you recall back to when the TNT2 was released, there was a significant improvement in driver performance after the initial drivers were released which coincidentally weren't that different from the latest TNT drivers at the time. In the next few weeks NVIDIA will hopefully perfect the GeForce's drivers which should bring a decent performance increase to the GeForce. For now we only have the benchmarks using the 3.47 drivers to go by but rest assured that performance will improve with updated drivers.

Luckily, there were no stability issues with the 3.47 drivers and they were fully compatible with all of our test platforms.