come on, I don't come here often... how good is Geforce2 MX DDR?

[Rigoletto]

I'm talking about the Creative labs 32Mb DDR. Looks quite a good price.
Is image quality really that bad? I use 1024x768 on my 15 trinitron monitors.
It doesn't have hardware bump mapping does it? Does its software emulation of it really look good? Will it make the current and future generation of games look really pretty? Any FSAA?
OK if you like or loathe the card or would like to share advice, please post while I read up on it on the web!

 

[Le Québécois]

Geforce2 MX DDR???
All Geforce2 MX are SDR no?
If you're talking about the MX SDR..... Yeah good stuff.
I have one...no hardware EMBM ( bump mapping )
And yeah FSAA..And game look awesome with it.

 

[novice]

I don't have much to compare it to, but I much prefer mine to the old voodoo 3 3000 I had before. Check out Creative's website for all the details they are willing to publish. I am satisfied with mine, and yes it is a DDR ram Geforce 2 MX, but they clocked it at just 143 MHz default, so the SDR cards will probably outperform it due to the slower clock speed and the 64 bit memory bus.
Chuck

 

[RoboTECH]

Creative' DDr board has slower RAM than the SDR boards out there.

as long as you don't go above 1024, you'll be okay, tho it's still pretty weak on trinitron monitors.

I'm almost postiive it does Dot3 bump mapping, but it'll be slow as a tree sloth, I'm sure.

the FSAA on the MX sucks royally.

 

[Rigoletto]

ROBOTECH, please explain for me why MX is weak on trinitrons because I am sitting in front of two right now!
You say the FSAA sucks. Well, I'm pleased the card actually can do FSAA anyway! But should I be worried about the performance of older games with FSAA on? e.g. 1999 and before, especially horrible 640x480.

 

[cool]

this is what I wrote at another thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=31&threadid=276674






Hey edm,

I bought the Annihilator 2 MX... "BIG mistake!", I thought at first... I totally overlooked that the data-path between video-RAM and the gfx-chip
is 64bit So if you have enough money, go get the GTS!

Performance is not bad with the Annihilator2MX but it's not as fast as a SDR-version with 128bit data-path. And don't forget: it comes without
a heatsink.
So the next thing I'm going to do, is attach a heatsink and o/c it to 200. the video-RAM is working at 143MHz (that is 286 DDR) by default. I
checked 166MHz (333DDR) and it worked flawlessly (10x loop in 3dmark2k). (Hyundai 7ns)

Here are my 3dmark results (at default clock 175/286):

4110 3D marks
388 CPU 3D marks
79,9 FPS
59,3 FPS
27,8 FPS
83,6 FPS
56,6 FPS
35,1 FPS
297,3 MTexels/s
577 MTexels/s
6707 KTriangles/s
4887 KTriangles/s
2866 KTriangles/s
192,9 FPS
185,3 FPS
141,3 FPS
75,5 FPS
110,2 FPS
133,4 FPS
196,6 FPS
Not supported FPS


o/c'ed 175/334:

4431 3D marks
404 CPU 3D marks
86,3 FPS
64,1 FPS
31,4 FPS
93,9 FPS
58,2 FPS
35,4 FPS
318,8 MTexels/s
624,1 MTexels/s
7206 KTriangles/s
5104 KTriangles/s
2924 KTriangles/s
219,5 FPS
209,2 FPS
147,2 FPS
75,4 FPS
129,2 FPS
156,5 FPS
225,2 FPS
Not supported FPS



my specs:
p3-650E
160MB-RAM
W98SE/DX8/Det 6.34

 

[cool]

hey novice,

I've done the same like you: switched from v3-3k agp to the CL GF2MX. Although I thought at first I did a mistake buying it when I found out that the data-path was only 64bit, but this card is getting each day better and better

Try clocking the RAM to 334MHz DDR (167MHz), so you can compensate the slow data-path and get nearly the same performance like a SDR.

and the image quality is top! so it is 'not weak at trinitron'. the card has a 350MHz RAMDAC which is as good as the one from the v3 cards... at least for me...

 

[novice]

So Cool, Did you get around to attaching a heatsink to your Creative Annihilator 2 MX yet? Am I to understand you went ahead and set the memory to 166 without any active or passive cooling on the GPU? Has it stayed stable? I haven't tried tweaking mine yet, but may attempt it this weekend. Looking forward to it.
Chuck

 

[Rigoletto]

Some of this is encouraging to me. I think the card is a basic one, but I am glad to hear of good image quality (what monitor are you running, what did you have before please?)

 

[novice]

I am running mine on a Viewsonic A70 17" monitor, and it replaced a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI card. I don't think it is that bad a card, but I may have a different opinion after I get the A-Open SDR card hooked up this weekend.
Chuck

 

[RoboTECH]

<< ROBOTECH, please explain for me why MX is weak on trinitrons because I am sitting in front of two right now >>

GTS core cards demonstrate fuzzy text and ghosting on trinitron monitors.

this tends to be noticeable in higher resolutions. Ih ave a 19&quot; and a 17&quot;, both Trinitrons, and both GTS cards i had were okay up to 1024. Above that, fuh-getaboutit. The 2d looked VERY poor to the point of annoyance. But that is a personal thing. I liked the 32MB GTS I had until I tried a 5500.

 

[cool]

novice wrote:
&quot;So Cool, Did you get around to attaching a heatsink to your Creative Annihilator 2 MX yet? Am I to understand you went ahead and set the
memory to 166 without any active or passive cooling on the GPU? Has it stayed stable? I haven't tried tweaking mine yet, but may attempt it
this weekend. Looking forward to it.
Chuck &quot;

No, I did not attached a heatsink. I tried an older one from my banshee but I can't attach it correctly (the holes are not in the right position) but I'll try to find one that's working...

So I just o/c'ed the memory from 286(default) to 334DDR (167MHz). Then I did a 10x loop of 3dmark2k--> no crash, no graphical anomalies or anything like that. I think a 10xloop in 3dm2k is not enough to say it's working absolutely stable 'cause there are too many tests in 3dm2k that are not graphics intensive (relatively!). Will do some loops in Q3A, too.


my Q3a fps jumped from 44.7 to 52.2fps after o/c'ing memory (1024x768x32bit, all max, bilinear filtering, compress. on)

I'm just wondering what results I would get with a SDR GF2MX in Q3A with the same settings as above.

 

[hg321]

So what did you get yours overclocked too, I used powerstrip and got mine to 230c/400m.

 

[Whisper]

Robo...that's very strange considering I have a Trini hooked up to my GTS. I run normally in 1024, but have set it to higher res's for periods of time just to check the quality of 2D etc, and haven't ever noticed any ghosting or blurring. Maybe I just got lucky

Anyways, if you're looking into an MX then I would personally recommend the Hercules/Guillemot solution as the Retail version apparently ships with 5.5ns RAM. However, if you're going DDR then I believe the Creative is your only option at the moment. Overclocking (at least the memory) is a MUST, and it greatly increases the performance of the card.

Was going to say something else, but I'll be damned if I can remember what it was. Oh, and Robo...my above statement wasn't meant to be one of those, &quot;bah, you say GTS sucks at high res in 2D but I haven't seen any evidence so you must be lying your a$$ off&quot; type comments. I was just saying that luckily I haven't seen any ghosting or blurring at res's higher than 1024.

 

[cool]

hey hg321,

with or without heatsink?

 

[classy]

The creative MX is slow compared to other MX cards. Here's a review where it is compared against a couple of other MX cards. There is also an individual review of the Creative MX card also on this site. Here's the review tbreak

 

[hg321]

I use a heatsink with artic silver thermal compound.

 

[Rigoletto]

Hmm. The Creative lacks perhaps 10% in some instances even on the other MX cards but I'm not too worried about that. If the image quality is good as it is supposed to be, I could bear that.

 

[cool]

I don't understand it! Why are you all worrying about the image quality. Believe it or not, I can see something on my screen... Like mentioned above, I switched from the V3-3000 (which has superior 2D image quality, almost Matrox-like) to CL GF2MX and I can't see a difference. I'm usually working at 1024x768 on my 19&quot;er but I can't go any higher 'cause the 'image quality' is bad. Not because of the vidcard but the cheap PEACOCK ENTRADA 19 monitor. 1152x864 is OK.

 

[Goi]

I believe the DDR MX's are new and use a 64bit memory bus instead of a 128bit one like the normal SDR MX's. Although the theoretical memory bandwidth stays the same, in practice its actually quite a bit slower.

 

[mcgi6ah2]

There is so much ill informed commentary on the Creative MX DDR. OK so its 64bit DDR, so it shouldn't be too different. There are no direct comparative benchmarks available I've seen yet. BUT if you go to www.tbreak.com you will see the 2 reviews, one for the Hercules and a combined one for the 2 new creative cards. Now if you match the results for the Hercules and Creative MX at the same clock speed from the two reviews (fair comparison as other benchs in test show they are using exact same configuration and getting same results elsewhere). You can see that the Creative is actually quite a bit faster than the Hercules, especially at lower resolutions. Now this isn't fair on the Hercules as it obviously overclocks further, but it does highlight that the Creative is fast. The creative memory appears to typically overclock to about 360mhz, although 400mhz has been achieved with additional cooling. On this basis its pretty good.

So there you have it the Creative is actually one of the fastest MX if you overclock it. The reason for this is probably not the DDR status of the memory but instead the inherent lower latency and the fact that it is SGRAM DDR.

 

[GEShields]

I just purchased a Creative Geforce2 MX last week and it is already going back...

The card was good in 3d stuff, but when it came to surfing or word documents it looked like the characters had shadows...

The Voodoo5 is much better all the way around...and only about $50 more expensive now.

Greg

 

[Rigoletto]

well maybe it is for Americans... but I'm still waiting for the price to drop over here in England. £130 would be very VERY good but I'm sure it's not going to go under £175

 

[mcgi6ah2]

Jungle.com have the Creative DDR MX for £80.