 GA
GF2560
Manufacturer
- Gigabyte
Tuesday, March 21, 2000 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium II 350 @ 392 MHz 100 MHz FSB
256MB PC 100 SDRAM
Software used
Windows 98 SE
DirectX 7.x
Gigabyte Detonator drivers v3.62
General
The GA-GF256 is a GeForce 256 32MB videocard powered by nVIDIA's GeForce GPU
(Graphics Processing Unit), it is equipped with 32Mb 5.5ns SDRAM memory and is bundled with a manual, S-VHS cable and driver CD. This videocard
has S-VHS Output connector.
A prelude
Today we will be looking at another
GeForce 256 based videocard. This time it'll be the latest one from
Gigabyte.
As I mentioned in other reviews,
Gigabyte is one of my personal favorite manufacturers. They have a
strong and solid research and development team and produce high
quality and steady product at an affordable price.
One question rises with the release
of this videocard though, why was it brought to the market so late ?
Last year only a select group of manufacturers had been granted approval
to produce GeForce based cards gigabyte wasn't one of them. Luckily
somewhere around December/January we
noticed that Gigabyte was developping a videocard based on the geForce 256 GPU.
Since
this will only be a SDR memory based card I also believe that Gigabyte
has brought this product on the market so late to keep the cost of
this product down. Let us just hope that the market has not become saturated,
on the CeBIT in Hannover I have seen about 15 new GeForce
manufacturers that can flood this market quite easily with a product
that is slowly fading out the market with the up and coming NV15 and
of course 3dfx's Voodoo 4 and 5.
Specifications/ Key Features
- NVIDIA GeForce256, 256-bit 2D/3D
graphics processor
- Ultra-fast 32MB SDRAM with 256-bit
graphics architecture
- Integrated transform and lighting
- AGP 4X with Fast Writes
- 32-bit color ARGB with destination
alpha
- 32-bit Z/Stencil and 8-bit stencil
- Cube environment mapping
- Anisotropic texture filtering
- 350MHz Palette-DAC
- DVD and HDTV ready motion
compensation for MPEG-2 decoding
- Industry's first 5-tap horizontal
by 3-tap vertical video filtering
- 8:1 up and down scaling on video
overlay
- Complete VIP 2.0 video
implementation (1x-8x Host, 75 MHz, 16-bit video port)
- WHQL-qualified drivers for Windows
2000, Windows NT 4.0, Windows NT 3.5, Windows 98, Windows 95, and
Windows 3.1
- OpenGL ICD for full OpenGL support
- Fully PC99 and PC99a compliant
- Optional TV out and Flat Panel
display support
Coming up: the
videocard review
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