Installation of the 3D Prophet II GTS went as
smooth as a baby's butt. Just plug the card into the AGP slot, fire up the comp
and Windows will ask for the drivers. Instead of installing the drivers that
came with the card, I installed the latest nVidia 5.22 reference drivers. The
computer specs are:
- Athlon 850
- Asus K7M Motherboard
- In Win 24" Case With 300 Watts PS
- 128 Megs
Corsair PC-133 SDRAM
- Pioneer 16X DVD ROM
- Maxtor 40 GIG 7200 RPM HD
- Aureal Vortex SQ2500 PCI Sound Card
- Smarfast PCI NIC
- Windows 98 SE
Just like the Gladiac, the 3D Prophet II GTS
had no problems running with the Athlon CPU. Everything I threw at it worked
without a hitch. It looks like whatever problems the original GeForce 256 had
with Athlon CPUs has been taken off in the GeForce2. For benchmarks, I used
Quake 2, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal and 3D Mark 2000. All setting were set at default
settings except for Quake 3.
Quake 3 has so many user adjustable settings
that there really is no set factory default. As a result, Quake 3 benchmarks are
really useless unless the reviewer shows the settings they use. I decided to run
the Quake 3 benchmarks the same way I play the game. My settings are:
Resolutions: 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200
Graphic mode: HIGH QUALITY
GL Driver: DEFAULT
GL extensions: ON
Color : 16 Bit and 32 BIT
Full screen: ON
Lighting: LIGHTMAP
Geometric detail: HIGH
Texture detail: 4
Texture quality: 32 BIT
Texture Filter: BILINEAR
The game options are:
Marks on walls: NO
Ejecting brass: NO
Dynamic lighting: NO
Identify target: YES
High quality sky: YES
The only things I really changed for the Quake 3 testing
is the resolution and the color depth. I found running the above settings gives
me the best speed with very good image quality.
Next Page: Benchmarks
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