The King of 3D

Since the release of the GeForce3 GPU, Nvidia’s product lineup has undergone a little change. Two additional cores are now available: Ti 500 and Ti 200. There are no new features in these two cores, but the clock and memory speed have been altered. While the original GeForce3 had a core clock of 200 MHz and memory clock of 460 MHz DDR, these figures for the Ti 500 are 240 MHz and 500 MHz, and 175 MHz and 400 MHz for the Ti 200. The Asus V8200 T5 Deluxe is based on the faster of the two cores, the Ti 500.

The Ti 500 has a computational power of 980 billion operations/sec, and a memory bandwidth of 8 GB/sec, compared to 800 billion operations/sec and a bandwidth of 7.4GB/sec for the original GeForce3 GPU. This card also has a TV-out and video-in connector on this card, so you can get display on your TV and also use the card to capture video from a Camcorder or a VCR.

This card delivered stunning performance in all our benchmarks and is clearly the best money can buy. Since we used a newer version of Nvidia’s Detonator drivers (ver. 21.83) for this card, a straight comparison with our tests would be unfair and hence has not been done. However, the gain in performance is mostly too high to be simply attributed to drivers. We used a system based on the Intel 850MD motherboard, running a P4 2 GHz, with 256 MB of RD RAM and a 7,200 rpm IBM DeskStar Hard drive.

The score in 3Dmark2001 which is a relatively new benchmark that exploits some latest features like Pixel and Vertex shaders and requires DirectX 8 was 7531, compared to a previous high of 5907. Frame rates in good old QuakeIII Arena dropped below 200 fps only when we moved to 1280x1024 resolution. Even at 1600x1200x32, this card managed to render 117 frames/sec. FPS ratings in 3D Winbench 2000 and Serious Sam (1024x768x32) were 272 and 89.6, again the best we have ever seen.

In terms of hardware, the Asus V8200 T5 Deluxe is just about as good as it gets. However, some of our complaints with Asus’s previous top-end cards’ software bundle stays. With a product like this, one would expect the best games as well. However, the games included (Sacrifice, Messiah and Star Trek New Worlds) are anything but this. One good program included is Asus SmartDoctor that lets you monitor RAM and chipsets temperatures, and supports dynamic overclocking. A software DVD player is also included. Finally, at Rs 36,000, this card is restricted to the high-end gamer who will have only the best.

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs