GeForce3 Performance FAQ
tnaw_xtennis 2001.03.15

We've put together some Frequently Asked Questions, for those people waiting desperately for reviews of the final GeForce3 card. We will use Quake 3 as a representative benchmark to illustrate the performance of the GeForce3.

1. Is GeForce3 really a new generation of video card?
Yes. As shown in Table 1, GeForce3 introduces the most new features and technologies of any new nVidia chip.

Table 1. Comparisons of Different nVidia Based Video Cards*

	Memory Bandwidth Improvement	Quake Performance Improvement	Important New Technology Introduced
TNT2 / TNT	+36%**	+43%**
GeForce SDR / TNT2 Ultra	-9%	+32%	Hardware Transformation & Lighting (T&L)
GeForce DDR / GeForce SDR	+81%	+42%	Double Data Rate (DDR) SDRAM
GeForce2 / GeForce DDR	+11%	+44%	NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR)
GeForce2 Pro / GeForce2	+20%	+21%
GeForce2 Ultra / GeForce2 Pro	+15%	+21%
GeForce3 / GeForce2 Ultra	+0%	+31%	High-Resolution Antialiasing (HSAA) through Multisampling Lightspeed Memory Architecture Programmable Vertex Shaders Programmable Pixel Shaders

* values calculated from benchmark results at 1600x1200x32bit from Ref. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
** 16bit color depth

2. What is the most compelling reason for consumers to buy a GeForce3 today?
For today's games, the biggest advantage is the the faster high-resolution antialiasing (AA) performance.

3. What kind of performance results can I expect from GeForce3 in today's games?
According the benchmark results using the latest development video card drivers, you can expect the performance shown in Table 2 at least.

Table 2. Quake3 ( 32bit color depth ) performance, in frames per second (fps) with a GeForce3*

Quake3 Performance	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
GeForce3 No AA*	/	101	71
GeForce3 2x AA**	85	50	32
GeForce3 Quincunx AA**	71	42	27
GeForce3 4x AA**	51	28	/

* values from Table 2 in Ref. 1
** values from of Table 1 in Ref. 2

4. Should I upgrade my CPU?
At the screen resolutions and color depth shown in Table 2, an Athlon 800MHz is powerful enough to drive the GeForce3. However, at the lower screen resolutions and color depths, it is not. At 800x600x32bit, even a Pentium4 1.5GHz only realizes 66% of the GeForce3 (Ref. 1).

5. How much of a performance boost does the GeForce3 provide over the GeForce2 Ultra?
You can expect the performance boost shown in Table 3, on non-AA and AA modes respectively. This table is based on benchmark results using the development driver.

Table 3. Memory efficiency and performance comparisons of GeForce3 and GeForce2 Ultra

6. Will GeForce3 provide better antialiasing (AA) image quality than the GeForce2 Ultra?
Of course it does. GeForce3 supports both super-sampling AA and multi-sampling AA, while GeForce2 Ultra only supports super-sampling AA. Also, consider the Quincunx AA mode: nVidia claims this mode delivers an AA effect similar to 4x, but at 2x speeds!

7. How can the GeForce3 provide better performance than the GeForce2? It has the same video memory speed and lower video core speed!
GeForce3 has an advanced memory bandwidth interface (Lightspeed Memory Architecture), and an advanced rendering mechanism (HSAA through Multisampling). As you can see in Table 3, Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA) provides a 29% performance boost over GeForce2 Ultra when runing on non-AA mode. While running on 2x AA mode, LMA and HSAA through Multisampling provide a total performance boost of 58%.

8. How does the Lightspeed Memory Architecture boost the performance of the GeForce3?
LMA increases the efficiency of the video memory greatly, which is explained through diagrams here. Table 4 shows this clearly.

Table 4. Non antialiasing  feature comparisons of GeForce3 (Driver 10.8) and GeForce2 Ultra*