Chaintech Desperado RI-91 GeForce2 GTS 64MB

The RI-91 is heavily targeted towards gamers, but 2D image quality is just as important as smooth 3D gameplay. It's a fact that an average computer user spends more then 75% of his computer time staring at 2D figures, such as web pages and text lines. Its also a well known fact that NVIDIA doesn't have the best "2D record" in the industry, and manufacturers such as Matrox, 3dfx and ATI have always surpassed NVIDIA in this field. However, it should be noted that NVIDIA cannot be blamed directly for this problem because the fault lies in the filters that board manufacturers use, and not with the RAMDAC on the NVIDIA chip. Not surprisingly, the manufacturers with the best 2D image quality happen to produce the boards and the chips themselves. This gives them an advantage, which ultimately results in a better 2D reproduction. Knowing the hard facts we equipped ourselves with a brand new Samsung SyncMaster 955DF display and performed a series of 2D image quality tests.

We chose 3 popular programs as our 2D benchmarks; Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe GoLive 4.0, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 (Random web pages). The reasoning behind this choice of benchmarking applications is very simple: maximize the variety of 2D models used, which in our case range from simple HTML text, to advanced 2D images. For comparison, we chose the Matrox G400 and the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000.

At 640x480x32 (120Hz) all cards performed very well, although the G400 stood out under Adobe Photoshop as it produced a more saturated picture. The difference becomes more noticeable as we bump the resolution to 1024x768x32 (100Hz), in which case the G400 was a whole step ahead of the RI-91 in every test. At 1152x864x32 (85Hz) the RI-91 met its end, and produced a non-impressive picture that came nowhere near the G400. Very high resolutions such as 1280x1024x32 (75Hz) and 1600x1200x32 (60Hz) showed the most difference in which the RI-91 produced a series of tiny blurry horizontal lines, while the G400 was still on top of all benchmarks. Voodoo3 was somewhat better then the RI-91, but still nowhere near the G400.