MSI's GeForce 3 Powered Starforce 822 ViVo
Not Just a GF3...It May Be "The" GeForce 3!

By, Marco Chiappetta
November 8, 2001

NVIDIA's new Titanium line of cards and ATi's new Radeons have been commanding most of the spotlight these days.  With the release of these "next generation" products, attention shifted focus, and prices on the preceding generation of products dropped considerably, placing some very powerful cards within reach of mainstream buyers.

This is the case with the "vanilla" GeForce 3 powered, MSI Starforce 822 we'll be looking at today.  A few short weeks ago, if we said a full featured, very overclockable GeForce 3 with TV-Out, Video-In and Video-Out would be available for about $250 you'd think we were crazy, but this is exactly what has happened.  The Starforce 822 is a very complete product, with features and a bundle usually reserved for much more expensive products.  Let's get down and dirty with the Starforce 822 and see if it can hang with the current "top of the line" cards costing hundreds more...

Specifications Of The MSI Starforce 822 GeForce3
Your Standard Reference Design With a Twist!

                        
Click any Image to Enlarge

GeForce3 Features:
  • nFiniteFX engine for full programmability
  • Lightspeed Memory Architecture for unmatched performance
  • Surface engine for high-order surfaces and patches
  • Programmable Vertex Shader
  • Procedural deformations
  • Programmable matrix palette skinning
  • Keyframe animation interpolation
  • Morphing
  • Fog effects (Radial, Elevation, Non-linear)
  • Lens effects (Fish eye, Wide angle, Fresnel effects, Water refraction)
  • Programmable Pixel Shader
  • Phong-style lighting for per-pixel accuracy
  • Dot3 bump mapping
  • Environmental bump mapping (EMBM)
  • Procedural textures
  • Per-pixel reflections
  • HRAA—high-resolution anti-aliasing
  • Featuring Quincunx AA mode
  • Integrated hardware transform engine
  • Integrated hardware lighting engine
  • DirectX and S3TC texture compression
  • Dual cube environment mapping capability
  • Reflection maps
  • Accurate, real-time environment reflections
  • Hardware accelerated real-time shadows
  • True, reflective bump mapping
  • Z-correct bump mapping
  • Phong-style lighting effects on bump maps with reflections
  Continued:
  • High-performance 2D rendering engine
  • Optimized for 32-, 24-, 16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes
  • True-color hardware cursor with alpha
  • Multi-buffering (double, triple or quad) for smooth animation and video playback
  • High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
  • High-definition video processor (HDVP) for full-screen, full-frame video playback of HDTV and DVD content
  • Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
  • Hardware color-space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
  • Motion compensation
  • 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering
  • 8:1 up/down scaling
  • Per-pixel color keying
  • Multiple video windows supported for CSC and filtering
  • DVD sub-picture alpha-blended compositing

Specially Selected Components

  • GPU and DRAM chips are selected for high performance and yield.
  • High Over-Clocking Potential

  Software Package:

  • Install / Driver CD-ROM manuals.
  • Full version of PowerDVD 3
  • Full version Ulead Video Studio 4
  • MSI 3D Turbo 2001
  • Idea Box .AVI Collection

THE BUNDLE:

 

The MSI Starforce 822 has a very complete bundle.  Inside the box you'll find the card itself, along with a decent user's manual and an S-Video cable.

 

 

The card also ships with some useful software.  Besides the obligatory drivers CD, full versions of the excellent PowerDVD 3.0 and ULead Video Studio 4 are included.  There is also a CD containing and .AVI collection form Idea Box and a sampling of drivers and utilities from MSI, including their 3D Turbo utility.

 


 

The Card, it's Drivers and Other Features