GeForce 2 MX performance

[Ovi]

Hi everyone!
Lets start with a joke: I bought a GeForce 2 MX 400 (64 MB) yesterday! Well, with the prices here………… US $70 for this, I couldn’t afford anything better! Well, it does look better than my TNT2 Pro (32 MB)!! Okay, now with my “problem”:
The GeForce is not performing very well, as compared to the TNT2. For example, 3DMark 2001 SE shows a score of 1100 as against 848 for the TNT2, which is fine I guess, but the fill rate of the Geforce is being reported as very low, much lesser than even the TNT2 Pro!
Here are the results for the fill rate:

Geforce 2 MX 400:
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 68.0 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 135.2 MTexels/s

TNT2 Pro:
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 183.8 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 187.8 MTexels/s

Benchmarking was done at the default settings (1024x768 @ 32bpp)

Now had it been the MX 200, I would not have been too surprised, the memory bus being of 64 bits, but here, both the TNT2 and the GeForce have 128 bit memory bus!
The Geforce is at the default settings, I’ve not changed anything, FSAA is also disabled. In general also the GeForce is not performing well, for eg. in CMR2 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 it’s performing worse than the TNT2 Pro, at the same settings!! Please help!!

System config: P-III 450, 256 MB PC 100 SDRAM, Acorp i440zx mobo, Samsung ATA/100 40 GB HDD, Mercury Geforce 2 MX 400 64 MB AGP, Creative Vibra 128 etc..
Running Windows XP.
Also, the card is on IRQ 11 and is not sharing it with any other device.

Thanks in anticipation of your replies
Ovi

[Guru]

Did you uninstall the old drivers?

[Technoid]

TNT2 Memory Speed: 150 MHz
Pixels Per Second: 250 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 2.4GB/s

TNT2 M64 Memory Speed: 150 MHz
Pixels Per Second: 250 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 1.2GB/s

TNT2 Pro Memory Speed: 166 MHz
Pixels Per Second: 284 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 2.65GB/s

TNT2 Ultra Memory Speed: 183 MHz

Pixels Per Second: 300 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 2.9GB/s


GeForce2 MX Memory Interface: 64/128-bit SDR, 64-bit DDR
Texels per Second: 700 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 2.7GB/s

GeForce2 MX 400 Memory Interface: 64/128-bit SDR, 64-bit DDR
Texels per Second:800 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 2.7GB/s

GeForce2 MX 200 Memory Interface: 64-bit SDR
Texels per Second: 700 Million
Memory Bandwidth: 1.3GB/s

The GeForce2 MX 400 has 0.05GB/s faster bandwith

BTW:
Isn't it wonderfull when you can't really compare because they use different ways for their different products?

[Ovi]

Guru: Yes, I uninstalled the old drivers!
Technoid: Yup, not much of a difference there, but then the GeForce should atleast report equal scores to the TNT2 Pro for the fill rates!! Though, on MadOnion I have generally seen GeForce 2 MX scores in the 200-300 MTexels/s range!

Hey, I just noticed that in the display properties, there's no tab for adjusting the colour, gamma, digital vibrance etc!!!! That tab should be there, shouldn't it?

Cheers
Ovi

[Greebe]

To be honest you next upgrade should have been CPU/MB. With what you have it's the limiting factor.

[Technoid]

If you don't have the tab then you might suffer from "driver rejection"!

Try downloading the latest from nvidia.com and before installing them manualy exterminate any of the old driver files....

[Ovi]

Greebe: Yup, I wanted to upgrade the CPU, MOBO first but the expense would have been too high (US $ 250 - 300), that's why I took this card, coz anything faster than the MX 400 would be wasted due to the system becoming a bottleneck! But the problem here is that on the same system, why did the TNT2 give higher scores??
Technoid: Oops I just found that tab, it was hidden under the nView settings, so the drivers seem to be installed properly. But to be sure, I uninstalled, then deleted all remaining traces, and then reinstalled the drivers! But the results are still the same!

[UtwigMU]

Check www.guru3d.com for benchmarks of various detonators. 23.11 is the way to go with GF2 line IMO.

GF2MX is only slighlty better than TNT2/Geforce line and Matrox G400.

In Unreal timedemo my GF2MX scored 39fps 1024×768×32 while my Matrox G400 16SH scored 34fps. (These benchmarks are not very accurate since i changed a few things between them and are just for my personal reference).

I pulled this from ars and it may be a good reference when upgrading videocards. This is based on fillrate.

Okay. I have further refined my list, and have removed all sub TNT class accelerators as they are irrelevant. Also, performance may as well be taken as groups, which I seperate by lines and have an approximation of their power, as some cards will outperform others in certain games. And yes, the Ti4600 is in a league of its own, its memory is running a lot faster then the 4400s, which makes for a pretty good speed boost.

Matrox Mystique/Millenium G200
Voodoo Banshee
3DLabs Permedia3
S3 Savage3D
Nvidia Vanta
ATi Rage 128
3Dfx/Obsidian 4440
Voodoo2
nVidia TNT
3dfx Velocity 100
S3 Savage4 Pro
nVidia TNT2 M64

-----------------------------
Geforce2 MX200
Voodoo2 SLI
Voodoo3 2000
nVidia TNT2
ST Micro PVR250
Matrox G450
Matrox G400
ATI Rage128 Pro
TNT 2 Pro
Voodoo3 3000
Voodoo3 3500
TNT 2 Ultra
Matrox G400MAX
TNT2 SE
ATI FURY MAXX
Voodoo4 4500 32 MB SDR

----------------------------
Savage 2000/Viper II
Geforce 256 32MB SDR
Geforce 2 MX 64bit DDR
GeForce 2 MX 32MB SDR
GeForce 2 MX400 64MB SDR
ST Micro Kyro I
Radeon 32MB SDR
----------------------------

GeForce 256 32MB DDR
Radeon LE
Voodoo5 5500 64 MB SDR
Radeon 32MB DDR
PowerVR/STM Kyro II
Geforce 4 MX420
Radeon 64MB DDR
GeForce 2 GTS
---------------------------

GeForce2 Pro
GeForce2 Ti450
ATi Radeon 7500
GeForce 2 Ultra
Geforce 4 MX440
Geforce 4 MX460
---------------------------
Geforce3 Ti200
Geforce3
ATi Radeon 8500
Geforce3 Ti500
GeForce4 Ti4200
GeForce4 Ti4400
-----------------------------
GeForce4 Ti4600

Geforce2/4MX/Radeon7500 would be a better way to go.

[103er-Fan]

Have you checked FSAA and Aniso settings? A friend of mine also wondered about a bad score, but then he saw that he had both enabled on his MX card.

[WyWyWyWy]

Greetings Ovi.
We have very similar config hehe

Why didn't you buy a GF4MX440 (or 7200) which is almost the price as your GF2, if you are from the Student Limited like me?

By the way, I didn't really know my G400 is as fast as a MX200...

[UtwigMU]

Yes it's hard to tell people that G400 is almost as fast as their MX. Umm, yes your G400 sure looks nice but it's so much slower in 3d than my MX.

In older games it's 10% slower. In newer games (Myth3) T&L and more memory make a difference.

[Ovi]

Thanks for the responses guys!
WyWyWyWy: Hey, its nice to know that you too have a similar config!! The reason that I didn't buy the GeForce 4 MX was because its still too expensive here (US $ 180 - 200)! And yes I'm a student too, soooooooooo...............
But of the choices I had, I stayed away from the GeForce 2 MX <b>200</b>, coz this is the model which has really bad performance (64 bit memory bus) as compared to the MX 400 (128 bit memory bus), which has reasonable performance in its class!
103er-Fan: Yup, I double checked the fsaa setting (and even enabled and then disabled it, to be sure), but there's no setting for aniso in D3D, its only in OpenGL (where its disabled)!
Something's fishy somewhere!!!!
I'll look up for some more info on this!
Cheers
Ovi

[Ovi]

Okay, I've been doing some comparisons on madonion with systems configured similarly to mine (same processor, chipset etc), and here are some observations:
My score: 1101
Highest score found: 1807

And now about the fillrates. I noticed that most people are getting scores like:
Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) (MTexels/s) 197.8

Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) (MTexels/s) 364.8

while some are getting scores equal to mine:

Fill Rate (Single-Texturing) 68.0 MTexels/s
Fill Rate (Multi-Texturing) 135.2 MTexels/s

I noticed that there are no scores in between this range!!
So, people will either get that good score or one which is around one-third of it!!!!
And all this with the same GeForce 2 MX 400!! Something is wrong somewhere!!

Any ideas??
Cheers
Ovi

[Ovi]

Update:
I just discovered something very disturbing. I ran Rivatuner to try and tweak the card and saw that it is reporting the memory bus of my GeForce 2 MX 400 as being 64 bits wide (with SDR ram)!!!! Now the memory bus is supposed to be of 64 bits for an MX 200, while for the MX/MX 400 it should be 128 bit with SDR ram or 64 bit with DDR ram! Otherwise there would be just the difference of clock speed b/w the MX 200 & 400, and would make the MX 400 even slower than a regular MX (due to the severely restricted memory bandwith)!
But, on the manufacturer's site, it says that for my Mercury GeForce 2 MX 400, memory config is <b>"64 MB (128 bit memory bus)"</b>, which is contrary to what Rivatuner reports (nd the benchmarks seem to confirm)!! What's happening here??????????
The link is here:

http://www.kobian.com/pr_dis_sp6800a.html

Please help!!
Ovi

[UtwigMU]

You can try taking that 450 to 600 if the board alows it.

I have my PII350@467 rock stable.