The Gainward Titanium Series Line-up
Pure Performance

By - Marco Chiappetta
January 3, 2002 

IMAGE QUALITY:

We have included some in-game screenshots, from the popular football game from EA Sports, Madden 2002.  The image quality with the entire Gainward Titanium line-up was on par with all other "GeForce" class products.

All of the screenshots above were taken at a resolution of 1024x768, at 32-Bit color with Quincunx Anti-Aliasing enabled.  The graphics in this game are excellent, who says console owners are the only ones with excellent sports games? Xbox and PS2, eat your heart out! :)

I'd quickly like to mention that the 2D image quality was also very good.  There was no mention of specific 2D enhancements, but I did not see any of the moire patterns sometimes associated with GeForce products at higher resolutions.  At a desktop resolution of 1600x1200x32, images were crisp and clean.

DVD playback was also very good, something we've come to expect from all GeForce powered products.  Its not quite as good as ATi's DVD playback, but it is close.

Our Test System Pentium 4 / i850 / RDRAM Platform

 
Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz. (1700MHz.) Processor

Abit TH7-RAID S423 Pentium 4 Motherboard

256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS RDRAM

IBM DTLA307030 30GB. ATA/100 7200RPM HD

Windows 2000 Professional w/ SP2 & Direct X 8.1

nVidia Detonator 4 Reference drivers, version 21.85

Intel chipset drivers, version 3.20

Video Cards:

Gainward GeForce 3 PowerPack Ti/550

Gainward GeForce 3 PowerPack Ti/450 Golden Sample

Gainward GeForce 2 Ti/500 XP Golden Sample
 

DirectX 8 - MadOnion's 3DMark 2001 and Remedy's Max Payne There's nothing wrong with a little Payne...

It's time to get the benchmarking started.  All of the tests were run with the Gainward cards set to their "Enhanced" settings.  In the Detonator Display control panel, we disabled V-Sync, and set DirectX quality to "Best Performance".  The first tests we ran were using MadOnion's DirectX 8 benchmark, 3D Mark 2001.

All three of the Gainward Ti cards performed excellently.  The "Enhanced" setting is basically a guaranteed overclock.  The clock speed increases translate into a measurable performance gain for all of the cards at every resolution when compared to "generic" GFx Ti cards.  We used the exact same system for testing in Jeff's review of the Visiontek Ti line-up, take a look at those scores to see just what kind of performance advantage these Gainward cards hold over default clocked Titaniums.

Next up, we performed another DirectX 8 test using PCGH's "Final Scene 1" demo and mod for Max Payne.  Max Payne and 3D Mark 2001 are both powered by the same "Max-FX" game engine.  We set all graphical options to "Medium" / 32-Bit color...

Don't be fooled by the "low" framerate scores listed in this test.  This timedemo stresses all of the consumer level graphics cards on the market today.  Notice the large advantage the GeForce 3's hold over the GF2 at high resolution.   The Lightspeed Memory architecture, and it's inherent bandwidth optimizations, incorporated into the GeForce 3's, and the DirectX 8 acceleration are the reasons for the performance advantage, even though they technically have a lower raw pixel fillrate than the GeForce 2 Ti.
 

OpenGL with GLExcess XS Mark