GeForce 3 Series - Performance

Performance

Regardless of the various improvements made to GeForce 3, the original GeForce 3 card and the Ti200 sometimes lose to the GeForce 2 Ultra. This is because the GeForce 3 GPU has the same pixel and texel throughput per clock as the GeForce 2 (NV15). The GeForce 2 is less efficient than the GeForce 3 overall, but the GeForce 2 Ultra GPU is clocked 25% faster than the original GeForce 3 and 43% faster than the Ti200. The GeForce 2 Ultra also has considerable memory bandwidth available to it, only matched by the GeForce 3 Ti500. However, when anti-aliasing is enabled the GeForce 3 is clearly superior because of its improvements in anti-aliasing support, and in memory bandwidth and fill-rate management.

GeForce 3 did not have DirectX 8-compliant competition until the arrival of the Radeon 8500. The Radeon 8500, when clocked at retail specifications, is superior to the original GeForce 3 and to the Ti200, but the Ti500 is similar to it. GeForce 3 also has multi-sampling anti-aliasing support, a feature not available with the Radeon 8500, which is much less demanding than super-sampling and is thus more usable in contemporary games.