Beta Test: MSI StarForce 822 GeForce 3 (1/7)

A few days ago, the taiwanese manufacturer MSI announced its new GeForce 3 card: The MSI StarForce 822 GeForce 3. The board is based on the NVIDIA reference design which means 200MHz chip- and 460MHz memoryclock. The 64MB memory are separated in eight 3,8ns fast SDRAM chips which are not cooled by heatsinks. A special detail of the MSI card is the new TV-Out encoder Chip Connexant CX 25871-13 (A successor of the Bt869 !?):

The MSI StarForce 822 GeForce 3

We all heard a lot of marketing stuff and big promises from NVIDIA these days. NVIDIA tries to hide benchmark results at this time because of "non final performance due to not yet optimized drivers". On the other hand, there are reports that GeForce 3 retail cards are allready available in stores in Japan. In addition, the NDA (including the point NVIDIA product performance, standalone board, in system board post GeForce 2 Ultra) fell a few days ago at 02/28. Several websites like Tecchannel, Chip Online, Digit-Life or Gamestar.de allready posted benchmark results so I donīt see any reason why I should not inform you about the current (beta) performance of GeForce 3, in detail: the MSI StarForce 822.

I reviewed the card with the newer version 10.6 in Windows 98SE, aside other reviews which used older v10.5 drivers. The review system is a mid-range performer: ASUS CUSL-2 I815 Mainboard with PIII 866E and 256MB CL-2. All tests ran without any crashes or visual artifacts - but you should still consider the results as "prototype performance". NVIDIA internals allready uses drivers v10.7 or newer.

Some Sales guys speak of the date of CeBIT (21/03) as the final relased date of GeForce 3 cards. This would mean about 3 more weeks ago from now. Time enough to improve the drivers performance. But one thing is fact: NVIDIA was not able to keep their 6 month release rhythm. They are already 3 month behind.

Drivers used during the testing:

• NVIDIA GeForce 2 Ultra (Sidebanding Enabled) - NVIDIA reference drivers v6.50
• MSI StarForce 822 GeForce 3 - NVIDIA reference drivers v10.6

NVIDIA changed the driver handling in their v10.6 drivers. There is a new rider for 3D AntiAliasing as well as new overlay options for video. In FSAA you can choose between automatic selection, which allows you to set FSAA setting in future games itself, and manual settings for 2x, 4x and the new NVIDIA Quincunx mode:

Systeminfo	Direct 3D	OpenGL	3D FSAA
Task Menu	Overclocking	Overlay	Advanced D3D

I wonīt leak this drivers... so just donīt ask me for it :-)

So enough blah at this time. Letīs take a look how NVIDIAīs new and overhyped GeForce 3 looks at the moment. I used a Sideband enabled Leadtek GeForce 2 Ultra as counterpart for the MSI GeForce 3. The Ultra ran with official NVIDIA v6.50 reference drivers - In my opinion the best W98 drivers for this card currently.

Copyright: 04.03.2001 -   RIVA Station 2001 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

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