Infobox

Product Reviewed: PowerGene Geforce2 GTS (CGTS2) Product Page Manufacturer: PowerColor Home Page Suggested Retail Price: $255 USD

Even with the recent release of the Geforce2 Ultra a few weeks ago and the fact that the Geforce2 GTS is more than half a year old, it's still one of NVIDIA's prized products and is still part of their most recent product line-ups. Targeted at the enthusiast gamer looking for the best performance but doesn't want to spend $500 on an Ultra card, the Geforce2 GTS chip is still a champion in the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Also, the fact that no companies, as of this moment, actually has a Geforce2 Ultra card available for purchase on store shelves means the Geforce2 GTS solution is still the fastest GPU available.

The PowerGene card came with a driver CD, manual booklet, 2 games (Wargasm and Test Drive 5) and Intervideo's WinDVD software.

The manual included about 30 pages of very detailed instructions on how to install the card and some reference information about the chipset. Another 15 pages or so of the manual is in Chinese, which is nice to see since PowerColor is a company based in Taiwan. The 2 games that were included were pretty old and really don't show off the Geforce2 GTS's true power, but they're better than nothing.

At first glance, the card didn't have anything special. It had the same general look of most of the Geforce2 GTS cards out there and had the usual standard video card heatsink and fan with a generous amount of thermal paste to ensure proper heat transfer between the surface of the chip and the heatsink. The card had 32MB of DDR SG-RAM, but there was no printing on the actual chips to help me determine what make, model or speed the memory actually is.

Installation was pretty much uneventful. Plug the card into the AGP slot, turn on the computer and let Windows take card of the rest. The driver CD included only NVIDIA's Detonator 5.22 drivers, which I quickly removed and installed 6.18 drivers over. It's unfortunate to see that PowerColor didn't include their own set of tweaking ultilities that comes with some of their other products (such as the PowerGene Geforce2 MX, mentioned later).

A quick look at the settings showed that the card ran the core at default 200MHz and the memory at 339MHz, which was a tad higher than the reference design, but it shouldn't be a big problem.

Specifications

• Powered by the world's first per-pixel shading GPU : NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS
• 256bit graphics core support AGP 4x/2x with Fast Writes for high 3D performance.
• Four new Hypertexel pipelines process two texture per pixel, in true color, at full speed up to 1.6 Gtexel fill rate.
• Built-in 32MB high speed DDR video memory with up to 5.3 GB/sec bandwidth.
• Integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC supporting from 640x480 up to 2048x1536 in true color.
• Eight texture mapped, lit pixels per clock cycle.
• Second generation Transform and Lighting (T&L) Engine.
• Up to 25 million triangles per second at peak rates.
• Support multi-texturing, Hardware bump mapping (Embossing, Dot Product3 & EMBM), llight maps, reflection maps, Full-Scene Hardware Anti-Aliasing (HW FSAA), trilinear and 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
• Full support for OpenGL and DX7 - Transform and Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective textures and texture compression.
• Multi-buffering (double, triple, quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback.
• Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering.
• BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) support Video acceleration for Direct Show and MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo.
• Supports hardware effects, such as: Motion Blur, Depth of Field via D3D8.
• Full support of DXTC and S3TC via DX and OpenGL correspondingly.
• Supports the large textures for photo-realistic quality.

On to: PowerColor PowerGene Geforce2 MX