A Torrid Affair with Graphics: April 2001 3D Market Update

NVIDIA's Spring Line

Yesterday, NVIDIA announced their “Spring line” of graphics accelerators.  Before you get excited, the line is nothing new, in fact one member of the line is something we reviewed at the end of last year.  For starters, NVIDIA is bringing the GeForce2 Pro to market as a retail card and not only as an OEM solution.  If you’ll remember back to our review of the GeForce2 Pro from last December, we thought it was a great alternative to the GeForce2 Ultra since it was noticeably cheaper and offered a good deal of the performance. 

NVIDIA's GeForce2 Pro Reference Board

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The reason that the GeForce2 Pro is cheaper than the Ultra is because of the fact that it runs at the same core clock speed as the regular GeForce2, 200MHz.  The Ultra however, is a lower yield part that operates at 250MHz.  The high-frequency, low yield chips like the GeForce2 Ultra are often much more expensive to produce (since much fewer actually work at this higher frequency) and thus increase the overall cost of the boards.  The GeForce2 Pro does have a lower memory clock than the Ultra (200MHz DDR vs 230MHz DDR), but it is priced at around $100 less than the Ultra according to our latest Weekly Video Card Price Guide.  NVIDIA’s official price on the GeForce2 Pro will be $229.  It seems like NVIDIA is attempting to de-emphasize the role of the GeForce2 Ultra in their product line which makes sense, since it is much cheaper for NVIDIA to sell GeForce2 Pros that it is for them to move Ultras.

NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX 400 Reference Board

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The second release NVIDIA made yesterday was the GeForce2 MX 400.  This part is one we also recently reviewed and as you will remember from that review, the performance is indiscernible from the regular GeForce2 MX.  The only real difference is a 200MHz core clock (which makes sense since Geforce2s currently ship at 200MHz and the MX yields were close to that good when it was released) and 64MB configurations.  The latter doesn’t really help performance too much however it may down the road when texture sizes grow even further.