ASUS V7700 GeForce 2 GTS

Quake III Arena Performance- demo 001

As with other GeForce 2 GTS based cards, the ASUS V7700 rocks. In Quake III demo001 the true power of the card begins to be seen at 800x600x32. Below this resolution, the limiting factor is not so much the raw video processing power but other factors, as can be seen with the relatively similar scores between cards under this resolution. Above 800x600x32, the ASUS V7700 is able to excel and continues to build speed al the way through 1600x1200x32. At these taxing resolutions, the GeForce 2 GTS's superior processing capabilities allow it to stand out from the rest of the processors out there. At the resolution of 1600x1200x16 the ASUS V7700 performs 64% faster than a DDR GeForce card. It is not only at this resolution that the card excelled: this margin of difference was not uncommon at and above 800x600x32.

It is easy to notice that the largest margins of difference occur in 16-bit color mode and not at 32-bit. This is due to the memory bandwidth limitations found on the GeForce 2 GTS. While the GPU may be capable of pumping out x number of frames per second, these frames need to be read into and out of memory in order to place an image on the screen. When using 32-bit color, more data needs to be moved into and out of the relatively slow memory pipeline, creating a bottleneck.