GeForce 3 Ti200 64mb
vs.
GeForce 3 Ti200 128Mb
April 1, 2002
Intro
With the Geforce 4 causing havoc in town, everyone is trying to get hold of one. Be it the MX or Titanium version depending on their needs. The GF4 MX, well, let's say extreme or hardcore users are not interested in this. We all know by now what they are capable of and who they are for. The GF4 Ti series is definitely the one to go for but not everyone can afford it at the moment. But don't despair, it's not a bad thing that the GF4 Ti has been the talk of the town. Prices of older cards goes down whenever new cards with new technology emerges. Gamers on the budget are actually the winners here. Take the case of the GeForce 3 Ti200. The prices of these cards has gone down considerably. And we all know the performance of this cards are not something to laugh at. They perform better than the newer GF4 MXs out there now. They have some of the new technology that the GF4 Ti series have that even the GF4 MX doesn't have. I mean the vertex shaders and pixels shaders thingy present in the nFiniteFX Engine which the GF3 Ti has and the nFiniteFX Engine II with dual vertex shader, thus the "II", found in the new GF4 Ti series. The most important thing probably why gamers would still go for the GF3 Ti series is due to the fact that it is fully DX8 compliant. The GF4 MX even though cheaper than the GF3 Ti200, not much though now, lacks both those functionality that makes the image quality crispier and more stunning.
Now why Ti200 and not Ti500? The only reason again would be the price. The GF3 Ti500 is much more expensive than the GF3 Ti200 and wouldn't pass as a budget card. The only difference the two types of GF3 titaniums has is their clocks. The GF3 Ti200 sports a 175mhz core clock and a 200mhz DDR memory clock, thus the 200 suffix in "Ti200", which is equivalent to 400mhz SDR. The GF4 Ti500 on the other hand sports a 240mhz core clock and a 250mhz DDR memory clock equivalent to 500mhz SDR. Now why they didn't use the actual DDR speed for the GF3 Ti500 and instead use the SDR equivalent, I don't know. If they did that, then we would have called the GF3 Ti500, a GF3 Ti250 instead. Now that doesn't sound much. So I guess its better to sound inconsistent and use the Ti500 as long as it looks like that there's a big difference and thus would equate the price difference too. hehe. Enough of that.
GeForce 3 Ti200
The GeForce 3 Ti200 is a cheaper GeForce3 version. It may be newer than the standard GeForce 3 but they have the same features only with a lower clock. The GF3 Ti500 is completely different as it has higher clock than both of them cards. The GF3 Ti200 also has a lower memory bandwidth compared to the original GeForce 3 and the GF3 Ti500. The table below would show the few differences each card share.
|
| GeForce 3 | GeForce 3 Ti200 | GeForce 3 Ti500 |
| Core Clock | 200 mhz | 175 mhz | 240 mhz |
| Memory Clock | 460 mhz (230mhz DDR) | 400 mhz (200mhz DDR) | 500 mhz (250mhz DDR) |
| Memory Bandwidth | 7.4 Gb/sec | 6.0 Gb/sec | 8.0 Gb/sec |
64Mb or 128Mb DDR???
Now there are 2 types of GeForce 3 Ti200 circulating now too. The GF 3 Ti200 with 64Mb DDR and the GF 3 Ti200 with 128Mb of DDR. Now usually more is better, but is there really any advantage in having 128MB of DDR against a similar card with just 64Mb of DDR? If you ask me the question now which one I would go for without looking at the benchmark scores, my answer would be, if they both have the same price of course I'll go for the one with more RAM as that would mean more buffer. But if there is quite a big price difference, I would surely settle for the 64MB one as I don't know at this point whether having 128mb of DDR has any real advantage in the case of the GeForce 3 Ti200. Now some would argue that theoretically there would be no difference but I personally would rather see it in action rather than rely on theory as the real thing is what that matters in the end. Besides experience has taught us that theory is not always what it seems to be. So to find out the real world answer to that question, we will put both GF3 Ti200 64Mb and 128Mb flavors on our testbeds and compare their performance.
