The specs
In terms of chip features, the Titan 3 is identical to any other GeForce3 out there. For a more detailed examination of these features, see our initial GeForce3 review. The Titan 3 will differ, however, in its fill rate and memory bandwidth. Because of its higher clock speeds, the Titan 3 will be able to leverage some extra performance from the existing GeForce3 architecture.

	Core clock	Pixel pipelines	Fill rate Mpixels/sec	Textures per pixel	Fill rate Mtexels/sec
GeForce3 Stock	200MHz	4	800	2	1600
OCZ Titan 3	215MHz	4	860	2	1720

OCZ doesn't crank the GeForce3's core clock speed up that much, and the Titan 3's fill rate closely follows that of a stock GeForce3. Still, the 15MHz increase does give you more fill rate to play with. With memory bandwidth being the primary bottleneck with today's video cards, how much of that fill rate increase the Titan 3 can leverage remains to be seen.

	Memory clock	Bus width	Memory	Memory bandwidth
GeForce3 Stock	460MHz (230Mhz DDR)	64 bits DDR * 4	64MB	7.4GB/sec
OCZ Titan 3	515MHz (258Mhz DDR)	64 bits DDR * 4	64MB	8.2GB/sec

Cognizant of the GeForce3's memory bottleneck, OCZ went to town ramping up the memory speed. Those copper RAM heat sinks don't just look cool; they have a lot to do with why the Titan 3's memory comes in clocked at 515MHz. With an impressive 8.2GB/sec of memory bandwidth, the Titan 3 even beats out NVIDIA's fastest GeForce3 Ti 500, whose memory runs at 500MHz.

At least on paper, the Titan 3 is stacked. The out-of-the-box overclocking provided by OCZ yields an impressive theoretical increase in the GeForce3's rendering capacity. We'll see in just a moment how much of that capacity is actually utilized, and how much of a difference it makes in the real world.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. All tests were run three times, and the results averaged.

The test system was built using the following.

Windows ME testing was left out for obvious reasons. Since Windows XP isn't officially on shelves yet, I decided to sneak this in as the last TR review on the Win2K platform. Realistically, though, a lot of us won't be upgrading to XP until at least a service pack or two is out, so Win2K is far from obsolete.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• MadOnion 3DMark 2001 Build 200
• Vulpine GLMark
• Quake III: Team Arena
• Wolfenstein MP Test Demo
• Serious Sam v1.02
• Max Payne v1.02
• SPECviewperf 6.1.2
• Dronezmark
• MDK2 Demo

The test system's Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit colour at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. All the tests were performed with all the visual goodies turned on, and in 32-bit colour. Let's face it: if you're dropping the coin for a GeForce3, you want all the eye candy it can provide.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.