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How well does a GeForce 3 work with older Hardware?
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Posted by: Foogar
This season Santa was extremely good to me. Seems he knew how much I could use a new video card for my system here so old St. Nick brought an Inno3D Tornado GeForce 3 ti200. I could have been one of those people that just sticks it in and goes at it right off, but I prepared a few benchmarks to see how everything would compare. Take a look at my system specs and see how you compare.
<font color="#FFFFCC">PIII 550
Generic 440BX motherboard
256 MB RAM </font>
<b>Video Cards: </b>
<font color="#FFFFCC">3Dfx Voodoo 3 3000
Inno3D GeForce 3 ti200 </font>
Yeah, it's a little older than what you have probably, but for now it's my baby. I had a slew of benchmarks I was going to run to get a good grasp of the overall increase here but I had to narrow it down to just 2 due to the time I had to do this. The first bench was Quake III Arena.
Many people feel Quake3 is THE defining benchmark for OpenGL performance and I tend to agree. I do however think it won't be long before Q3A is pushed down the tubes though and a new benchmark standard comes. All Quake3 benchmarks were ran at high quality 1024x768 with 16 bit color and bilinear mode to get an honest comparison since that's what the voodoo 3 could handle.
Quake III Arena - Voodoo 3 3000
<b>41.6 frames per second </b>
Quake III Arena - GeForce 3 ti200
<b>48.8 frames per second </b>
Not a really great increase here if you ask me. I decided to reinstall the game and see if maybe that would help things more.
fresh Quake III Arena - GeForce 3 ti200
<b>54.8 frames per second </b>
This is closer to what I had hoped. If I had time I would have done a fresh install of Windows 98, but with my job free time seldom comes, even in the holiday season.
The final benchmark is a controversial one. Some people feel that 3DMark 2001 really has no real world use other than generating a number you can brag about. I only use it because I don't have any other D3D benchmark really.
3DMark 2001 - Voodoo 3 3000
<b>1084 Marks</b>
3DMark 2001 - GeForce 3 ti200
<b>3356 Marks</b>
This looks like a much more substantial increase than we saw with Quake 3, but depending on your views this could also just be a worthless benchmark.
I hope this gives you some help in knowing what you'll get when upgrading the video system on an older computer. Remember that the 440BX system doesn't have 4x AGP, and I do have a slower processor by todays standards. I also haven't tweaked any settings for the new card yet so it's generally sitting there how the 'average' user would leave it for the time being. Given this I would say if I wasn't planning to upgrade my motherboard and CPU in the next month I would have been better off getting a GeForce 2 MX and saving some cash.
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