The chip specs
Now that we've established the identities of our two main contenders, we're about ready to get down to the performance tests. Before we do that, however, let's take a look at the basic specs of each chip and see how they stack up against some of the other graphics solutions floating around out there. The following specs are handy for comparing graphics chips, but as these chips become more complex, these sorts of numbers tend to matter less and less. The memory bandwidth and pixel throughput numbers, in particular, are just theoretical peaks.

	Core clock (MHz)	Pixel pipelines	Fill rate (Mpixels/s)	Texture units per pixel pipeline	Fill rate (Mtexels/s)	Memory clock (MHz)	Memory bus width (bits)	Memory bandwidth (GB/s)
Kyro II	175	2	350	1	350	175	128	2.8
GeForce2 GTS	200	4	800	2	1600	333	128	5.3
GeForce2 Ultra	250	4	1000	2	2000	460	128	7.4
GeForce3 Ti 200	175	4	700	2	1400	400	128	6.4
GeForce3	200	4	800	2	1600	460	128	7.4
GeForce3 Ti 500	240	4	960	2	1920	500	128	8.0
Radeon 64MB DDR	183	2	366	3	1100	366	128	5.9
Radeon 8500	275	4	1100	2	2200	550	128	8.8

It's close, but the Radeon 8500 has an edge over the GeForce3 Ti 500 in both peak theoretical fill rate and memory bandwidth. Let's see how that plays out in the real world...

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

The test systems were built using:

Processor	AMD Duron 1GHz AMD Athlon 1.2GHz AMD Athlon 1.4GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 1.53GHz	Intel Pentium 4 1.6GHz Intel Pentium 4 1.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 2GHz
Front-side bus	133MHz (266MHz DDR)	100MHz (400MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-7DX rev. 4.0	Intel D850MD
Chipset	AMD 760/VIA hybrid	Intel 850
North bridge	AMD 761	82850 MCH
South bridge	VIA VT82C686B	82801BA ICH2
Memory size	256MB (1 DIMM)	256MB (2 RIMMs)
Memory type	Micron PC2100 DDR SDRAM CAS 2	Samsung PC800 Rambus DRAM
Sound	Creative SoundBlaster Live!
Storage	IBM 75GXP 30.5GB 7200RPM ATA/100 hard drive
OS	Microsoft Windows XP Professional

We ran the bulk of the tests on our Socket A test platform with an Athlon XP 1800+ processor.

For comparative purposes, we used the following video cards and drivers:

• ATI Radeon 64MB DDR with 6.13.3276 drivers
• ATI Radeon 8500 with 6.13.3286 drivers
• NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra 64MB (NVIDIA reference card) with Detonator XP 21.83 drivers
• NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB (NVIDIA reference card) with Detonator XP 21.83 drivers
• Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB with 9.031 drivers
• VisionTek Xtasy 6964 (NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500) with Detonator XP 21.83 drivers

We also included a "simulated" GeForce3 Ti 200, because we could. We used PowerStrip to underclock our GeForce3 card to Ti 200 speeds and ran the tests. The performance of the GeForce3 at this speed should be identical to a "real" GeForce3 Ti 200. If you can't handle the concept of a simulated GeForce3 Ti 200 card, pretend those results aren't included.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• 3DMark 2000 1.1 Build 340
• 3DMark 2001 Build 200
• Giants: Citizen Kabuto 1.4
• Quake III Arena 1.30
• Serious Sam 1.02
• SPECviewperf 6.1.2
• VillageMark 1.17
• Vulpine GLMark 1.1

A word about our benchmark selection. I wanted to test with a number of newer games, like Aquanox, Dronez, Max Payne, and the Wolfenstein Multiplayer Demo. For one reason or another, I chose not to test with these games. Dronez and Aquamark are still works in progress with some compatibility problems. In the case of Max Payne, I was unsure whether benchmarking the game's cut scenes really worked properly. On these very fast video cards, the game seemed to hit an internal limit at about 75 frames per second, even with vsync disabled. The Wolfenstein MP demo was more troublesome, because I couldn't get it to produce consistent results.

I'm aware that other sites—and heck, even other reviewers here at TR—have used Wolf MP and Max Payne with apparent success, and I'm not saying those results aren't valid. Still, for the sake of this review, I decided to play it safe and omit these tests.

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

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.