NVIDIA's Fall Product Line: GeForce3 Titanium

Playing the clock speed game

It's clear from this latest round of graphics card releases that AMD and Intel aren't the only ones that play the clock speed game in this industry.  In response to NVIDIA's Titanium threat, ATI has cranked up the clock speed on their Radeon 7500 card.  However they did not increase the memory clock speed, just the core clock.  So the Radeon 7500 will now ship at 290MHz core (instead of 270MHz) with 230MHz DDR SDRAM.  In virtually any game at 1024 x 768 x 32 this increase in clock speed will buy you a whopping 0 - 3% performance increase.

NVIDIA isn't innocent of playing this same game either.  We were surprised when our GeForce3 Ti 500 reference board came clocked at 240/258 (core/mem) instead of the 240/250MHz NVIDIA had said the card would be shipping at.  When we asked NVIDIA their response was that "OEM cards are clocked at 240/258MHz while retail cards will be clocked at 240/250MHz."  Their reason for doing this was to give the OEMs a little extra performance; how much extra?  You guessed it, 0 – 3%.

Why would ATI and NVIDIA even bother with small clock speed increases (7% for ATI and an even smaller 3% for NVIDIA)?  Remember that they have to play the same clock speed games when marketing their cards to large OEMs (where both ATI and NVIDIA make the vast majority of their money).  Higher clock speeds are definitely checkbox features that OEMs can appreciate.  At the same time, in situations where two cards perform very close to each other, percent or two can change performance standings in a bar graph quite dramatically.  This is one reason you should always look at the tangible improvement, not just the position of a bar on a graph. 

In the case of the GeForce3 Ti 500 we chose to test at the clock frequency that the retail cards would be shipping at, 240MHz core and 250MHz memory.  If you're curious as to how a 258MHz card would perform, just imagine another percent or two tacked on to the frame rate.