I've been lurking around this forum for a while, and I haven't seen anyone report anything like the experiences I've had, so I figured I'd put a quick post in here and see if I'm alone in these or not.
Anywho, I have a couple of machines here that were getting a bit dated with their video and were starting to have problems with some of the newer software titles. Since it had been a while since my last upgrade, I decided to go for broke, as the saying goes, and bought a Visiontek Geforce 3. I was very impressed with the card at first, and it seemed to be living up to most of the hype. The additional "tests" in 3DMark 2001 looked phenomenal. However, as I used the card more, I began to notice little things that weren't right. Testing with some of my older DX6 and 7 games, I noticed "glitches" in the rendering. Text, icons and so forth seemed to be ever-so-slightly corrupted, with pixels out of place here and there. Not enough to be any real problem, but just enough to make things slightly ugly. In Diablo II, I'm getting a "glitch" in the text-boxes and menus that appear close to the top of the screen. For example, when an NPC is speaking, the the top row of text gets distorted just as it is scrolling past the top, and the edges of the box do not align with the rest of the box. Again, just a pixel or two off, but enough to be somewhat ugly. Turning on 2x2 FSAA fixes this problem, but causes black, vertical lines to appear in some places such as dungeons with brick walls.
All this being said, the GeForce is still very impressive overall, but I must say I am slightly disappointed. I guess I expected a "top of the line" card to have top-notch image quality everywhere.
A couple days ago, I decided to do the upgrade on my other machine. Since this machine is mostly a server, but can be used for network and online games occasionally, I decided to go the "good but not so expensive" route and bought a Hercules P4500 (Kyro 2) card for it. My experiences with it have been quite the opposite of the GF3. Maybe it's only because I expected this card to be "good but not spectacular", but so far I've been pretty impressed with it. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's been doing very well for everything "real" that I've tried it with. The 2D and 3D image qualities are both outstanding. The same games that looked slightly ugly with the GF3 looked better than I think I've ever seen them. The color-saturation and texturing quality look very nice, and everything looks smooth and picture-perfect, not a single pixel out of place. Even games which I expected to be somewhat taxing for this card, such as Black and White, play very smoothly and look as good or better than I've seen on other cards. DVD playback seems to be close to perfect as well, with very good image quality and no dropped frames using PowerDVD 3. As I said, though, it's not quite perfect yet. Games do experience odd slow-downs at certain times in unexpected places, but for a card that cost a fraction of what the GF3 did, dissipates a fraction of the power and uses inexpensive SDR memory, it's been pretty impressive to me.
I apologize for the length of this post, but I did want to pass these experiences on to folks who are considering either of these cards and I am a little curious to know if anyone else has been having any of the peculiarities with the GF.
Anywho, I have a couple of machines here that were getting a bit dated with their video and were starting to have problems with some of the newer software titles. Since it had been a while since my last upgrade, I decided to go for broke, as the saying goes, and bought a Visiontek Geforce 3. I was very impressed with the card at first, and it seemed to be living up to most of the hype. The additional "tests" in 3DMark 2001 looked phenomenal. However, as I used the card more, I began to notice little things that weren't right. Testing with some of my older DX6 and 7 games, I noticed "glitches" in the rendering. Text, icons and so forth seemed to be ever-so-slightly corrupted, with pixels out of place here and there. Not enough to be any real problem, but just enough to make things slightly ugly. In Diablo II, I'm getting a "glitch" in the text-boxes and menus that appear close to the top of the screen. For example, when an NPC is speaking, the the top row of text gets distorted just as it is scrolling past the top, and the edges of the box do not align with the rest of the box. Again, just a pixel or two off, but enough to be somewhat ugly. Turning on 2x2 FSAA fixes this problem, but causes black, vertical lines to appear in some places such as dungeons with brick walls.
All this being said, the GeForce is still very impressive overall, but I must say I am slightly disappointed. I guess I expected a "top of the line" card to have top-notch image quality everywhere.
A couple days ago, I decided to do the upgrade on my other machine. Since this machine is mostly a server, but can be used for network and online games occasionally, I decided to go the "good but not so expensive" route and bought a Hercules P4500 (Kyro 2) card for it. My experiences with it have been quite the opposite of the GF3. Maybe it's only because I expected this card to be "good but not spectacular", but so far I've been pretty impressed with it. Of course, it's not perfect, but it's been doing very well for everything "real" that I've tried it with. The 2D and 3D image qualities are both outstanding. The same games that looked slightly ugly with the GF3 looked better than I think I've ever seen them. The color-saturation and texturing quality look very nice, and everything looks smooth and picture-perfect, not a single pixel out of place. Even games which I expected to be somewhat taxing for this card, such as Black and White, play very smoothly and look as good or better than I've seen on other cards. DVD playback seems to be close to perfect as well, with very good image quality and no dropped frames using PowerDVD 3. As I said, though, it's not quite perfect yet. Games do experience odd slow-downs at certain times in unexpected places, but for a card that cost a fraction of what the GF3 did, dissipates a fraction of the power and uses inexpensive SDR memory, it's been pretty impressive to me.
I apologize for the length of this post, but I did want to pass these experiences on to folks who are considering either of these cards and I am a little curious to know if anyone else has been having any of the peculiarities with the GF.
Oh well we will see what happens.
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