GeForce 2

[Guest]

Hi,what is your experience with GeForce 2 cards with FU3 and what is FSAA?ThxTFT

[Guest jonpoint]

Hi TFT,I have been using an old Geforce 2MX 32MB ('Motocross Madness 2' reports it as a 'Geforce MX100/200 !??!) card for a while now. My home PC is a dog (!):Celeron 366 overclocked to 457MHz256M RAMSB64 etc.So I don't expect a lot from it but I usually run it with all sliders on ~70% and still get 10-12fps. For screenshots I pump everything to 100% and get 5-6fps but flying this way is not much fun! With my old TNT 32MB card and 128M RAM I used to get 2-3 fps with these settings :-(.FSAA relates to the hardware 'anti-aliasing' that accelerator cards can do. Basically, if you have a blue sky against a darker horizon you'll see a horizon where the 'bumps' appear as incremental lines. You get the same effect when viewing a runway at an angle - as you fly past it looks like a whole lot of ants moving across the screen.With anti-aliasing, the hardware (your video card) 'fudges' the adjacent pixels to an 'in-between' colour so the image appears smoother and you don't see the increments as much. The problems with using Geforce FSAA in FU3 are that it slows down the video fps and, in the F2 or F3 views can put a blue or grey line across the middle of the panel.I don't use it at the moment but if I had a faster PC I might put up with the blue line. With 2x FSAA my framerate drops by 2-3 fps, with 4x FSAA it drops by 5-6fps which is all a bit too much!I hope this helps!- Jon Point

[Guest Motormouse]

That pretty much tallies with my own,I recently put a 32mb GeForce 2 Mx400 card in my machine,PIII 550mhz,256 Ram,SBpci16 sound,I found that the anti-aliasing (FSAA) gave too much of a drop in framerate to be acceptable,it does look nice with FSAA on though!:-wavePete

[Christopher Low 5,352]

The FSAA mode with a GeForce 2 certainly looks better than the standard mode, but there is room for a considerable amount of improvement. That's why I'm interested with the "Accuview" anti aliasing engine of the GeForce 4, using 4xFSAA mode, and maybe also tri linear or anisotropic filtering. I may have to get a more powerful PC though !Chris Low,ENGLAND.

[Guest]

Hi,does the GeForce 3 with FSAA also produceing this wite lines in Fu 3?by the way, what is the difference of the chipset Geforce 2, MX, ti and so on?thxTFT

[Guest jonpoint]

Hi TFT,I now remember why I didn't do much with FU3 when I got it years ago - with 366MHz/64M ram/8M video card + system, I couldn't advance the sliders at all! Funny thing is, I'm still using the same processor...For an overview (actually it's quite detailed!) of Nvidia chips, go to www.nvidia.com and look in the products/specs. There are lots of differences between board products but I believe that the core 'engines' (Geforce 2, 3, 4) are similar. I have even heard of patches to upgrade cheaper cards to more full-function but I would guess that most versions are mask-programmed and can't be changed.You can also download hacker progs like 'rivatuner' etc which give you access to many functions within the chip. I've played with it and whilst I can always improve quality, you can't beat the numbers - a better picture means lower framerate. :-(See if you can find 'benchmark' details for the card you want. I did this and found a cheapo GE2 card (<<$100US) which benchmarked as good as a more expensive variant. At the time I was interested in performance using 'Motocross Madness' and sure enough, I got good performance - but only bearable in FU3. Now that Geforce 4s are getting cheaper I may consider one - after I've installed the new motherboard/processor/memory... :-DGood luck,Jon Point

[Guest]

Hi,FU frame rate is more depending on the processor then on the graphic card.With my AMD 450 and the TNT 16 MB card I had about 5-7 frames at Seattle approach sliders 80% right.With my Athlon 800 and the bTNT 16 MB card I

[Christopher Low 5,352]

TFT,Before proceeding, it would be sensible to remember that the framerate in FU3 would be increased more by a CPU upgrade than a graphics card upgrade. In other words, you will get a greater increase in performance by upgrading your processor.Chris Low,ENGLAND.