G400 MAX vs. Hercules 3D Prophet GeForce2 MX

[Jon P. Inghram]

Wow, I'm rather dissapointed in the GeForce2 MX... CS wasn't significantly more playable, and the interface for the drivers really stank compared PowerDesk.

It also defaulted to run every resolution at the maximum possible refresh rate which made what was otherwise a quite acceptable picture quality decay into a fuzzy blur on my monitor (KDS AV195TF). I had to go in and change each possible screenmode and color depth combo to something more reasonable to get it to look halfway ok.

Here's the results 3Dmark 2000 gave, using the 5.32 drivers on the GeForce, and 5.52 on the G400MAX. Notice the G400 actually had a higher AGP texturing rate, and how close the score is when you consider the age of the G400.

I can proudly say I owned a Nvidia card for about 4 hours, and will patiently wait for the next-gen Matrox card.


[This message has been edited by Jon P. Inghram (edited 12 November 2000).]

[DosFreak]

No comment. I refuse to comment.....

Look at your own post and hopefully....some day you will see where you went wrong.

[impact]

I have to agree with DosFreak here. What did you expect Jon? That the MX will be significantly faster?

Think again. You should've tried a non-MX Geforce 2. You'd get much more than a meagre 25% increase. Not all nVidia's cards are as bad as this one...

[DentyCracker]

The reviews basically said that. I think the point Jon was trying to make is that in his case the speed increase was not significance in playing a game that he (I presume) plays often. He also notes that the AGP texturing speed seems to be faster. What is your problem with his statement DOSFreak. It is just a video card, is it not. Is the optimisation used incorrect?
Impact you'd also pay a hell of a lot more than for an MX too so what exactly is your point.

[Jon P. Inghram]

I couldn't really afford to pay $200+ just to get better framerates. Since I do play Counter-Strike quite a bit, and the the MX didn't really improve gameplay by a large margin, I decided it wasn't worth it. Now, if I had upgraded from a G200 instead of a G400MAX I would have been quite happy with the speed and price of the MX.

[impact]

That's the point... why would one want to upgrade from MAX to MX?

After all, you only loose the 'A'. ;-)

[Jon P. Inghram]

I was more curious than anything. When I had my G200 I tried out a V3-3000 and wasn't too impressed by it either, and ended up getting this G400MAX instead. It doesn't hurt to try different stuff every once and a while, if even just to verify that the card you've got can still keep up even in it's advanced age.

[dZeus]

Look at your own post and hopefully....some day you will see where you went wrong.

Check the T&L optimization... I think that is what he means.

On the MX you should also set it to software, because 3DFarq gives a far too high score to these hardware T&L boards, more than would be realistically in realworld performance.

With software T&L, I think that the G400 MAX and the GeForce MX are really close... (if not that G400 even faster).

[Jon P. Inghram]

I wanted to test the MX at it's best, but I really should have done a seperate test without the HW T&L too... but I didn't think about it at the time, oh well. But it wasn't like I was making my chose solely on 3DMark2000 performance, I actually played some games (Evercrack, Counter-Strike) to see if it was that much faster in RL applications.