Conclusion
A pretty damned impressive card really. Visual quality is superb in both 2 and 3D. I have tried this card with all sorts of games, from Quake 3 to Thief 2 to Deus Ex, and all run very nicley. I have not had any unusual artifacts so far and performance has been silky smooth at my new normal resolution of 1024x768. Quake 3 flies along without any of those annoying slowdowns I sometimes had when rounding corners into a big room full of new textures. Even Thief 2 with its dire graphics engine nips along quite happily. I did briefly have a play about with FSAA, but to be honest I don’t notice a big enough difference in visual quality to make me want to bother with it.The question on eveyone’s lips is of course, is it better than a Geforce 2? Never having used one, I can’t tell you directly. With the new 3 series drivers the GFs do seem to kick butt. However I would remind you that the Geforces do have memory bandwidth problems which have only been got round so far by chucking faster RAM at it. The Radeon, with its smarter HyperZ features, flies along very smoothly at higher resolutions. I would suspect that there are hewer slowdowns when the going gets tough. The Radeon also has a good feature set which we may well see th benefit of more in the future, with its triple pass textureing. and enivironmental bump-mapping.
And finally, the 64 mg version is only £30 more than the 32 meg card, so I would definetly recommend it as to futureproof the buy if nothing else. While not many games really need it now, they soon will.
