NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro

Windows 2000 Driver Performance

As we noted in the driver section, the GeForce2 Pro utilizes the same driver set as all other NVIDIA products, the Detonator3 driver set. Therefore, we can conclude that the Windows 2000 performance of the GeForce2 Pro will be identical to the performance while under Windows 98. For more information, please see the GeForce2 MX Windows 2000 Performance section of our Budget Video Card Comparison for November 2000.

Overclocking

The 3D Prophet II GTS Pro did not provide us with the ideal overclocking platform. Although memory heatsinks are standard, the lack of thermal compound between the core and the heatsink and fan combination means we may have lost some overclocking ability here.

Regardless of any inadequate cooling methods, the GeForce2 Pro was very willing and able to overclock. Reaching a maximum speed of 230 MHz in the core and 465 MHz in the memory, the GeForce2 Pro actually surpassed GeForce2 Ultra speeds when overclocked. The performance increase as a result of this overclocking is nothing to be taken lightly: although the CPU bottleneck at 640x480x32 results in no performance difference between the standard card and the overclocked card, at 1024x768x32 the overclocked GeForce2 Pro gains a 6% speed boost and at 1600x1200x32 is able to boast a 21% performance increase. Running at 57 FPS when overclocked, the GeForce2 Pro was actually able to tie the GeForce2 Ultra.

We suspect that many GeForce2 Pro cards will be able to reach similar speeds as a result of the 200 MHz memory used on the card. A boost from 400 MHz to 465 MHz requires an overclock of just 32 MHz of SDR performance, something we are used to getting out of memory chips.

On the core side, it is not a surprise that that GeForce2 Pro overclocked to about the average we saw in GeForce2 GTS chips. Although we were able to get a good number of GeForce2 GTS cores higher than the 230 MHz that the GeForce2 Pro hit, the limitation is most likely not in the chip itself but rather in the poor cooling method used by the 3D Prophet II GTS Pro. It is unfortunate that any further MHz gain from the GPU will most likely not result in any increase in performance as a result of the memory bandwidth limitations that are present even at a 465 MHz memory bus.