NVIDIA GeForce 64 MB

Pentium III 750E - Quake III Arena demo001.dm3

The results collected under a normal run of Quake III Arena are not too surprising. We find that when set to "normal" mode, as this was the mode used to perform the benchmarks, the 64 MB DDR GeForce has a bit of a tough time standing out from the 32 MB GeForce. This is due simply to the fact that the GeForce card is not being pushed to any great limits in this demo. The on card memory is not coming close to being saturated and therefore the 64 megabytes of RAM work just as effectively as the 32 megabytes.

At the resolution of 1024x768 and below we actually find that the 32 MB GeForce outperforms its 64 MB brother. This is most likely due to the fact that all 32 MB GeForce cards use faster SGRAM while 64 MB cards use slower SDRAM because of the lack of availability of 8 MB SGRAM chips. Once the memory begins to get more saturated, the difference between the two becomes less due to the fact that the GeForce processor can not send information as fast. At high colors and resolutions we see the 64 MB GeForce take the lead by a hair.