• 256-bit graphics architecture
• 32MB high-performance
• SDRAM 350 MHz Palette-DAC
• AGP 4X with Fast Writes
• Peak fill rate of 480 million bilinear filtered, multi-textured pixels and more than 3.8 gigatexels per second
• Up to 15 million triangles per second at peak rates Integrated transform, lighting, setup and rendering engines
• Four 32-bit 3D rendering pipeline (this is where the 256-bits come in) 4 texture mapped, lit pixels per clock cycle
• Single pass multi-texturing support (DirectX®6.X and OpenGL® ICD)

For this SE GeForce 256 test run, we dusted off several different PC set ups and prepped them via ScanDisk and a Defrag for our benchmark suite. The test rigs included:

• Processors: Intel Pentium III 600MHz, 550MHz, 500MHz & Celeron 300A @450MHz
• Memory: 128MB of WinTec PC100 RAM
• Motherboard: Abit BE6 2.0
• Hard Drive: Quantum Fireball 8.4 Gig HD
• Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value
• CD/DVD: Creative DXr5
• 3COM LAN Card
• Windows 98 Second Edition with DirectX 6.1 & 7 installed
• Monitor: Sony Trinitron 400PS

We used the following video cards with the following sets of drivers:

• Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator 32MB SDRAM with 3.47 reference drivers
• Guillemot Maxi Gamer Xentor 32 TNT2 Ultra- default clocked at 175 core/183 memory

We choose to run a slightly different suite of benchmarks this time around in orderto show you the difference between NVIDIA's latest generation chip (the NV10) and its predecessor (the TNT2) and just how much of an impact the on-board T&L engine can have. You'll recognize that we've used Quake 3 but slightly more in-depth than before. We ran all timedemos with both the 'NORMAL' and 'HIGH QUALITY' settings only changing the values for the resolution. All tests were run until a consistent score was obtained and with V-Sync turned 'off'.