NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS

Improved Hardware T&L Engine

Another improvement the GeForce 2 GTS offers is a more powerful Hardware T&L engine.  Like the ATI Charisma Engine, NVIDIA’s solution now supports the processing of all transformation, clipping and lighting calculations on the chip itself instead of offloading them onto the host CPU. 

The improved engine is also capable of processing 25 Million triangles per second at peak operation.  This is definitely an improvement from the 10 – 15 million triangles per second of the original GeForce.  In spite of these improvements, we have yet to see any games truly take advantage of hardware T&L, but if NVIDIA and ATI are correct, by the end of this year we will no longer be able to make that statement.

NVIDIA supplied us with a custom made Quake III Arena level that featured an extremely high polygon count in order to test the power of NVIDIA's hardware T&L engine in an actual real world situation. Below we have a screenshot from the level:

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NVIDIA's Hi-Poly Quake III Arena level didn't seem to exhibit any performance difference between the GeForce 2 and the original GeForce, although as the resolution increases the GeForce 2 separates itself from the original GeForce because of its more powerful fill rate.

The Voodoo5 5500 is easily outperformed at all resolutions below 1280 x 1024 x 32, but at higher resolutions it begins to outperform the 64MB DDR GeForce as the fill rate becomes the limiting factor instead of the T&L capabilities of the card.