NVIDIA's Fall Product Line: GeForce3 Titanium

Black & White

A very different type of game than what you're used to seeing in these reviews, Black & White places you in control of a civilization as their god.  This Direct3D game relies on a high enough frame rate that navigating around your worshippers' villages isn't choppy.  The user has a third person perspective of the world.

The game was set to 1024 x 768 x 32/1600 x 1200 x 32 with the preset maximum detail configuration used.  We used fraps to take the average frame rate during the intro scene with the family and their child journeying towards the water (the movie was skipped).  Note that the latest version of fraps does take an actual average frame rate so this is not an estimate.

At 1024 x 768 x 32 the GeForce3 Ti 500 is 10% faster than the GeForce3; the GeForce3, in turn is 9% faster than the GeForce3 Ti 200. As you'd expect, the GeForce2 Ti 200 and the GeForce2 Pro are almost identical in performance since they have the same amount of memory bandwidth. Both of those cards are 10% faster than the Radeon 7500.

Even the T&L-less Kyro II is faster than the regular Radeon 64DDR in this test.

At 1600 x 1200 the cards with the greatest amount of memory bandwidth or most efficient usage of what they have rise to the top. The Ti 500 is still untouchable and 14% faster than the GeForce3. The Radeon 7500 moves up a few notches but is still slower than the comparably priced GeForce3 Ti 200.

The Kyro II moves up another notch in the standings but mainly because the GeForce2 Pro doesn't have efficient enough use of its memory bandwidth to maintain its previous lead.