Remember back to the GeForce2 GTS, Pro and ULTRA products, where NVIDIA ramped up the core and/or memory speeds to achieve higher performance? Well, that's essentially what the GeForce3 Ti 500 is: a higher clocked version of the original GeForce3.

Although it is clocked at a higher rate, the GeForce3 Ti 500 is still produced using the same 0.15 micron process of the GeForce3 (the GeForce2 has a 0.18 micron design). The overall design has not changed, as it features quad pixel pipelines and supports up to 64-MB of high-speed DDR memory.

The two main changes have taken place with the core and memory speed. The original GeForce3 shipped at a core speed of 200 MHz and a memory speed of 460 MHz. While the memory speed was on-par with the previous high-end GeForce2 ULTRA, the core speed was a full 50 MHz slower and similar to the older GeForce2 Pro and GTS models. Comparing core speeds between difference chip designs can be difficult, but due to their incredible architectural similarities and on-par memory speeds, the GeForce2 ULTRA did outperform the GeForce3 in a select number of benchmarks. The GeForce3 is certainly the faster 3D chip for most games, but not overwhelmingly so.

NVIDIA has alleviated this in two ways. First, the high-end GeForce3 Ti 500 now runs at a core speed of 240 MHz, along with a higher memory speed of 500 MHz. This should make any comparison between the GeForce2 ULTRA and the GeForce3 Ti 500 a moot point and this new product now includes not only the high-end 3D features, but also a clock rate to match. The second method seems to be by pushing the GeForce2 ULTRA out of the mainstream product line and replacing it with the new GeForce2 Ti. These new Titanium products make the NVIDIA line a lot cleaner and clear up the potential problem of a GeForce2 ULTRA encroaching on the lower-speed GeForce3 Ti 200.

Here is a small chart that should illustrate quite clearly the main differences between the three GeForce3 models:

Specification	GF3 Ti 500	GF3	GF3 Ti 200
Core Clock	240 MHz	200 MHz	175 MHz
Memory Clock (DDR)	500 MHz	460 MHz	400 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	8.0 GB/s	7.36 GB/s	6.4 GB/s

As the GeForce3 Ti 500 shares the same feature set as the GeForce3, we thought it appropriate to recognize all levels of readership and give a short run-down on its features and enhancements.