NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro

MDK2 Performance

Similar to what we saw in Quake III Arena at 640x480x32, the driver engine of the GeForce2 series cards are up to par, meaning that only the CPU remains as the limiting factor, for the most part. As you can clearly see in the above graphs, both of NVIDIA's "fastest" offerings actually perform below their lower costing counterparts, the GeForce2 GTS and the GeForce DDR. This performance difference is most likely a result of the less efficient SDRAM memory used in both the GeForce2 Pro and the GeForce2 Ultra. Since both the GeForce2 GTS as well as the GeForce 256 DDR use SGRAM chips, it is expected that we see some sort of performance difference between the two at very low resolutions. This does not last long, however.

At 1024x768x32, we find that the GeForce2 Pro continues to fill the gap between the GeForce2 GTS and the GeForce2 Ultra. Running at 131 FPS, the GeForce2 Pro performs about 16% faster than the GeForce2 GTS and about 5% slower than the GeForce2 Ultra, placing the card closer to Ultra performance in MDK2 at 1024x768x32.

The performance of the GeForce2 Pro at 1600x1200x32 models the results we saw at 1024x768x32. Once again, the GeForce2 Pro performs 8 FPS faster than the GeForce and 10 FPS slower than the GeForce2 Ultra, providing us with the same performance difference we saw in Quake III Arena under this resolution.