Is faster memory worth paying $100 more for a video card? Depends on how you play the game.
A new type of memory gives another option to gamers who will try just about anything to squeeze another 2 percent of performance out of their hardware.
In their never-ending quest for more frames per second (fps), gamers will upgrade their videocard or computer on almost a monthly basis. Anything that gives you a speed advantage in the heat of battle during Quake 3 can't be ignored.
Nvidia, the current darling of the video chipmakers, has the flavor of the month in its GeForce 256 chip, which it calls a Graphics Processor Unit (GPU). The GeForce chip handles the transform and lighting (T&L), which can really tax a processor when playing 3D games like Quake, Unreal, or Half-Life.
T&L, the process of rendering a 3-D image, is up to 60 percent of the load on a CPU, which leaves little room for other things, like artificial intelligence or realistic physics.
Dedicated graphics chips offload much of that bottleneck, and enable games to use far more realistic imagery and depth of field. Shortly after Nvidia introduced the GeForce 256 in September 1999, videocard OEMs announced plans for cards that would add Double Date Rate (DDR) memory.
Creative Labs, Elsa Graphics, and Leadtek are among the many graphics card vendors that have adopted DDR. Although DDR memory is more expensive, it offers twice the throughput of standard video memory without increasing latencies or requiring higher memory clock speeds.
The faster memory also allows higher resolutions to be used while maintaining the higher frame rates. So DDR probably won't mean much if you run a game at 640x480, but at 1024x768, it could make a difference.
To see if the reality matched up with the theoretical performance boost, Wired News tested the Creative Labs Annihilator and Annihilator Pro, which both use the GeForce chip and include 32MB of memory. The Pro, however, uses DDR memory. For comparison purposes, the Diamond Viper 770 Ultra, which uses Nvidia's previous top-of-the-line TNT2 chip, and includes 16MB of memory, was also tested.
The results? The faster memory can make a difference, especially at 1024x768. When using Quake 3 at 800x600, the GeForce with DDR ran at 61 frames per second, a 15 percent improvement over the standard GeForce, and it scorched the Viper by more than 43 percent.
At 1024x768, the DDR-enhanced card at 50 fps was a whopping 46 percent faster than the standard GeForce (34 fps), and was more than 63 percent faster than the Viper (30 fps).
The MadOnion.com's 3DMark 2000 benchmark was also tested, even though it isn't fully optimized for the GeForce's T&L engine. But it still does a decent job of gauging performance.
Both GeForce cards pummeled the older Viper's 3DMark of 2,761. The standard GeForce came in at 3,647, and the DDR card was another 10 percent better, at 4,029.
All of the tests were run using the latest drivers for each card without over clocking or any special tweaking. The tests were run on a 550MHz Pentium III with 128MB of memory. With the Quake 3 tests, all of the eye candy, such as 32-bit, tri-linear graphics at maximum detail, was turned on.
Tests of Quake 2, an older game that is not optimized for the GeForce, showed very little performance gain –- a few percentage points at best –- when using DDR memory. But because the GeForce has so much raw power to begin with, both Creative cards slaughtered the TNT2 board.
If you really want Quake 3 to crank, you'll have to turn off some of the extra eye candy. In the game's default graphics mode, the game racked up 67.6 fps in 1024x768 mode on the DDR card. But with all the graphics features turned on, that drops to 50.1 fps, a 25 percent drop in performance.
The question then becomes justifying the price. The Annihilator is $249 while the faster Annihilator Pro is $349. Is it worth the extra $100? For first-person shooter fanatics with large monitors who like speedy splattering with games optimized for 3-D, it probably is.
For the less dedicated gamer, or someone who plays games that are not as frame rate-intensive, the Annihilator may prove to be enough. Both cards are worthy successors to TNT2-driven cards.
