NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 64MB

Quake III Arena Performance

Of all the performance gains that an extra 25MHz core clock would give, we expected to see the most performance increase at low resolutions, including at 640x480x32 as shown above. Unfortunately, it seems that even at this resolution, the memory bus is overstrained, meaning that the extra core speed of the GeForce2 MX 400 is unable to be harnessed in any way. This is clearly shown above with both the original 175MHz GeForce2 MX performing essentially identically to the 200MHz GeForce2 MX 400.

The same lack of improvement is present at 1024x768x32. With the GeForce2 MX 400 scoring only .3 FPS faster than the GeForce2 MX, the difference between the two cards at this resolution is nonexistent. Judging by the look of things so far, NVIDIA may as well just left the GeForce2 MX alone and not even bothered to up the core clock speed at all.

Finally, at 1600x1200x32, the GeForce2 MX 400 is able to slightly distinguish itself from the original GeForce2 MX. However, judging by the large amount of data that must pass over the memory bus at this resolution as well as the complexity of scenes here, it is more likely that the additional 32MB of memory did more for the GeForce2 MX 400 than did the 25MHz increase in core clock speed. Outperforming the original MX by only 6%, the difference between the GeForce2 MX and the GeForce2 MX 400 could easily be caused by slight variations in card designs.