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Posted by
Julio
Franco on October 25, 2001
Manufacturer: Visiontek
Product: Xtasy
6964 GeForce 3 Titanium 500
Check
for Xtasy
6964 Ti500 prices here.
 Earlier
this year, NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce 3 Graphics Processor,
which can be considered their second most ambitious project
ever, the first being the nForce.
The
cards based on this chip have been available for several
months now from a very wide selection of manufacturers;
nevertheless it has not become a mainstream product due to
its relatively high price. Until recently GeForce 3
‘vanilla’ cards were being sold in the $300-350 price
range
But
of course, also until recently these cards had been
untouched in a manner that no other chip maker had a product
to compete directly with it. ATI has now released the Radeon
7500 & 8500 boards, the latter offering similar
next-generation & DirectX 8 features that were only
available on the GeForce 3. Where ATI has put more pressure
over NVIDIA though is the price/performance value, where the
new ATI line-up shines (supposedly).
The
way NVIDIA has divided their new Titanium product line is
nothing new to us, and shouldn’t be to you either. If you
have been following their products long enough you will
notice they have done this several times before with their
TNT2s & GeForce’s 2 (M64, Vanta, MX, Pro, Ultra) and
if you look at today’s market, results haven’t gone any
bad at all for them.
Here
are some quick specs of the new GeForce 3 Titanium family:
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GeForce3 Ti 500 Graphics
Core:
Memory
Interface:
Fill Rate
Operations per Second:
Memory Bandwidth:
GeForce3
Graphics
Core:
Memory
Interface:
Fill Rate
Operations per Second:
Memory Bandwidth:
GeForce3 Ti 200 Graphics
Core:
Memory
Interface:
Fill Rate
Operations per Second:
Memory Bandwidth:
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256-bit
128-bit DDR
3.84 Billion AA Samples/Sec.
960 Billion
8.0GB/Sec.
256-bit
128-bit DDR
3.2 Billion AA Samples/Sec.
800 Billion
7.36GB/Sec.
256-bit
128-bit DDR
2.8 Billion AA Samples/Sec.
700 Billion
6.4GB/Sec.
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Visiontek
was kind enough to send their whole line-up of Titanium
based products for testing. The first I’ll put to the
test is the Xtasy 6964 based on the GeForce 3 Ti500 chip,
the fastest of the gang.
Visiontek’s
reputation has grown considerably over the past year or
so, they have gone through a transition process from an
OEM manufacturer/distributor to a complete retail
competitor. According to the information I have, they used
to make boards for other big companies such as ELSA, now
that they have moved into the retail market however their
cards are being shipped on flashy boxes with fancy
graphics, quite an advance from what we used to see in
their previous products.
It’s
also a remarkable thing that they are the first company
with Ti cards on store shelves. In fact, at the time we
were writing this, no other manufacturer had their Ti
based products ready yet. The main reason for this is that
Visiontek helped NVIDIA with the manufacturing of beta
test boards, giving them advantage and extra time to have
their cards on shelves first.
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