The card more or less looks, and works, like any other GeForce3 you've read up on or used... just faster. For starters, it comes with its core clocked at 240MHz and its 64MB of 3.8 ns DDR memory at 250MHz, letting it effectively operate at 500MHz. This is up from the GeForce3's reference setting of 200/460, and the use of 3.8ns memory means there should be some elbow room in terms of fiddling with those settings. But given that engineering samples are not always indicative of what you should expect from a retail card, we'll be holding off on overclocking until our reviews of retail cards get published in the coming weeks.

The faster default speeds of this card (with the exception of the 350MHz RAMDAC, which remains the same as in earlier GeForce3's) make it no surprise that the card performs better than its predecessors. The memory bandwidth of this card, to illustrate the improvement, is 8.0 GB/sec, up from previous GeForce3's 7.36GB/sec performance. And the performance boost provided by NVIDIA's Detonator XP drivers also help take benchmarking scores to new heights.

These drivers, of course, are the ones we first started hearing about at around the same time that ATI was sending out preview samples of its RADEON 8500 boards. First released to the public in the past few weeks, they've already been updated once and have improved performance pretty dramatically, even for existing GeForce3 cards. And while the most recent update to these drivers, released while this review was being prepared, comes with a version number of only 21.83, the versions we received with our review sample of the Ti 500, are the as-yet unreleased 21.85's.

To just quickly demonstrate how much of a boost is gotten out of the latest drivers, here are some quick 3DMark2001 and Quake3 scores.

Card	Score
GeForce3 w/ 21.85 drivers	6617
GeForce3 w/ 12.41 drivers	5707

Card	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
GeForce3 w/ 21.28 Drivers	176.2	146.1	107.4
GeForce3 w/ 12.41 Drivers	161.8	110.4	76.4

So as we see, here, before we even get to the Ti 500's hardware improvements, using the Detonator XP drivers results in a 16% performance boost in 3DMark2001 and a whopping 40% performance increase in Quake 3, at a resolution of 1600x1200 and with "High Quality" settings.

Something else that should great improve gamers' experiences is NVIDIA's use of Shadow Buffers to create more realistic shadowing effects. With pixels now rendered from eye point of view and shadows having softer, more realistic, edges, this means that we'll get to move closer to kind of graphics we saw in this past summer's Final Fantasy movie in our games.

And with their use of 3D texture compression, NVIDIA will also allow game developers to enable 3D textures in games by shrinking 3D textures to 1/8 their previous sizes. This means more realistic atmospheric effects like lighting, fog, smoke, etc. All in all, this should make for visual quality that makes us look back and scoff at games like Max Payne, that seem so impressive today.

Those of you who want to make sure that you'll still be getting the features that have become standards of NVIDIA boards in recent lines won't be disappointed. The retail cards being announced and/or released this week, most of which will be almost identical copies of the reference design, all come standard with TV-out, DVI-out (DVI-I, actually), High-performance Antialiasing (HRAA), and DirectX and OpenGL optimizations.

What also hasn't changed is that games look and play great. By upping the ante on performance, NVIDIA doesn't just allow you to brag that you can run Quake3 at 1600x1200x32 at over 124 frames per second... it allows you to finally start taking full advantage of antialiasing and other in-game features that had previously brought even systems with the fastest graphics cards to their knees.