NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS 64MB

Athlon 750 - Quake III Arena Quaver.dm3

In our 64 MB GeForce review, we introduced the use of Quaver as a system stressing benchmark. Recorded in a Quake III level where textures are known to be large, when the texture quality slider in Quake III Arena was set all the way to the right Quaver was able to cripple many of cards. With the release of the 5.xx series drives which included the addition of S3TC compression, it seems that the Quaver benchmark can be toppled by almost any card using S3TC compression. This leaves only the ATI Rage Fury MAXX in the dust due its lack of this compression method.

Quaver remains a good benchmark to show how cards perform on situations that previously were thought to be the highest stress possible. We see once again that the 64 MB GeForce 2 GTS holds the top spot in 16-bit color rending in all modes except for 1280x1024. At all resolutions below 1600x1200, it seems that the extra memory is not helping in 16-bit color mode, with the 64 MB GeForce performing nearly identically to its 32 MB brother. This lack of performance is due to the fact that at 16-bit color, the card is simply not crunching out enough data to fill the 32 MB of memory, let alone 64 MB of it. In these situations, the extra memory goes unused and seemingly wasted. It is not until the resolution is cranked all the way up to 1600x1200 in 16-bit mode do we notice any difference between the 64 MB and 32 MB versions. With the large amount of data that must be stored in the memory at this high resolution, the 64 MB card prevents any minuscule amount of AGP texturing and results in a 6.7% speed increase when compared to the 32 MB version.

In 32-bit color mode, the memory system becomes taxed earlier, with performance of the 64 MB card becoming noticeably better at resolutions of 1280x1024 and above. This resolution and color depth appears to act in the similar manner to the 1600x1200x16 resolution, with the additional memory accounting for a 7.4% speed increase. This margin is expanded when at 1600x1200x32, with the large amount of data passing to the memory being speed up by the extra 32 MB of storage space. This results in a 9.3% performance increase.