This was my first Nvidia card, after having used a Voodoo 2 for several years. Paired it with the AMD Athlon 600 I was running at the time. I believe I my Geforce 2 GTS was from Asus and had a yellow PCB. A great card when I got it, but 3D graphics accelerators evolved so fast back then that it was already painfully showing its age 1-2 years later.
Agree! You can run today games on a GTX 480/580. Not on the highest setting, but you can run it on pretty decent looking graphics. Very few games fom 2007 can run on a GF2 GTS from 2000. And maybe that's a good thing. A greater focus on implementing the modern much higher compute power for other things, than just suck as much money out of gamers. As far as I know... Life does not get better with prettier graphics in games. But maybe it can get better, if we use the power for other beneficial science stuff.
I remember Unreal Tournament 2003 already being practically unplayable on my GeForce 2 GTS. It's why I upgraded to a GeForce 4 Ti4600 in late 2002. If you look at various RUclips videos, you can see that games from 2004 like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will barely even run on a GeForce 2. Cards from this era got outdated so ridiculously fast.
GeForce 2 GTS brought my gaming into a new era back in the day. 32 bit color! I bought it for a brand new coppermine PIII rig and it was blazing fast. This video really brought back some good memories.
32 bit colour was much better on Geforce rather than the TNT series, but ATI had amazing 32bit colour support long before Geforce ever came around. I remember my Rage 128 Ultra barely lost any FPS in GP500 when switching between 32 and 16 bit colour. It wasn't until Geforce 3 came around that Nvidia started to catch ATI with feasible 32bit support.
This was my first graphics card! Bought it and Sacrifice at CompUSA that day. It blew my friggin mind, my brother said we'd never need another video card again
I had one of these back in early 2001. I remember how amazing it was at the time. Unreal Tournament, Half Life, Quake III Arena, all the good games, at 1024x768 with good frame rates. Makes me want to build a 2001~2003 era gaming rig.
I used to own an Asus V7700 back in 2001. Paid 650.000 Italian Lire for it, which is about 600 euros today. It was 3d and had wired shutterglasses. Quake in 3d was really impressive. When an ogre threw a bomb at me, more than once I literally ducked!
That's a disgusting price, even given the inflation rate. Over here it was around £200 for a GTS Pro on launch, around 250 euros? Lets call it 320 given inflation. For 500 euros you could have had a Geforce 2 Ultra, which was WAY overpriced back in the day. Looks like the Italians got bumfucked regarding parts back then.
Imho is that 99.99% of those people (subs) are not the sharpest knives available. This is a great channel for us enthusiasts that enjoy facts over la-la-land. Brings back great memories to see these parts from the past!
Man, im starting with the retro scene like 2 months ago and you have plaged youtube with a lot of good videos, a lot of times when i search for info you have a video related to what im looking for. Really appreciate your work!
This was my first ever 3D accelerated card. Well, not counting an onboard S3 ProSavage on the first machine I built, because thay was more a 3d decelerator. Anyway, awesome to see you looking at a card i have such fond memories of
I have a GeForce 2 GTS in my PII-450 Windows 98 retro build, and the difference between Hardware and Software T&L is dramatic on slower CPUs. It's pretty much a 100% performance boost in my particular case, since the GPU is so much more powerful than the CPU is (two years was a long time back in that era)!
"and the difference between Hardware and Software T&L is dramatic on slower CPUs. It's pretty much a 100% performance boost in my particular case, since the GPU is so much more powerful than the CPU is" talk more!
@@polariszene8542 I haven't tried that out, but I do have the FF7 demo kicking around on an old magazine cover disc somewhere. My guess is that it will probably need older drivers to work properly.
I just got a GeForce 2 GTS to replace my Radeon. 7500. Mine is a gimped version that has less cores, and slower memory, it’s also a PCI version. I originally got it because the motherboard I had only had PCI and no AGP. I recently picked up a new slot 1 board that has AGP and am excited to try it out.
First Graphics card i ever bought, didnt even have a computer of my own at that point, used it on my little brother computer, before i got my first own pc, 1000mhz Duron build.
I wanted to buy a GTS back in 2000 but couldn't afford one, however, i did get a Geforce 2 MX a few years later, instead of a GTS because i couldn't buy the GTS anymore when i could afford it, which replaced my Voodoo 2. I did get a little bit nostalgic when i saw those Geforce 2 Tech Demos, at the end of your video. I remembered seeing them featured in computer magazines at the time. Wow, Magical!!
I had it too. It was in my first PC. CPU was AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz. I bought the CPU as 1.2 but it was easy to clock it 200Mhz higher. Those were the days.
Good job on your website driver page, it's a great reference for retro-computer guys! Found a GeForce2 Ultra in a thrift store bin a few months ago, I think for $5 or less. It's now part of my K6-2+ 570ACZ DFI AT gaming rig!
1:44- they have more mistake there. Release date for Geforce 256 DDR was actually in november or december 1999. SDR version went out month earlier. For sure, in august 1999, card was not yet out.
The shaders were probably used mostly for implementing the multitexturing/blending combination hell that was DX7. I vaguely remember you could just go piling up combination over combination over combination.
Αnother card that I paid so much money back then and didnt actually enjoyed it. Mine was 64mb inside a big black box having a T-Rex on the back. It came after several voodoos and tnt's that passed from my hands. Believe me guys,nothing can beat the Voodoo on what it did back then,pc gaming became interesting again for me after 2006 with the xbox 360 style graphics.
I would say the software rendering example was unfair. At the time your high CPU would have been an Intel P3 866 or an Athlon 1Ghz, which the hardware would have creamed those two. Overall great video really loved seeing these things again from my past.
Back in the days I got a bleeding edge Athlon 500 on an Asus K7M (I believe that was the Version) with 128MB RAM and a GeForce 256 DDR 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro. The slot A platform was just released so I got my new motherboard in a plain white cardboard box... I remember my first overclocking attempts using a goldfinger device after cutting a hole the case of the processor...
Doom 3 uses the NSR technology for its lighting. It's how it runs on the GeForce 4MX and GeForce 2 while looking like Doom 3. It only lacks the heat distortion effects. And pixel shader 1.0 was still quite limited and only a minor step up from something like the NSR or GameCube's TEV.
32MB vs 64MB is a tricky thing to benchmark. I remember many websites back then claiming 64MB were useless. However if you use the correct approach you can see the difference. You need to benchmark not just the average frame rate, but the minimum one too. When a 3D card runs out of memory due to the frame buffer usage and texture usage, the card will start to struggle and will copy the textures back and forth between the system memory and the card memory (aka texture trashing). en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science) The q3dm9 map in Quake 3 for example has a few sections where 32MB is just not enough and the frame rate collapses from 40fps to 5fps. It got better once NVIDIA correctly implemented AGP texturing in their later drivers, lowering the need to transfer the textures back and forth as the textures could be directly accessed via the AGP bus. Nonetheless there is still a perceivable difference. I remember the perfect spot in q3dm9 to observe this difference. I'll also believe some people made some demos showing this problem. For example Quaver demo: alt.3dcenter.org/downloads/quake3-quaver.php Be sure to disable texture compression and push the texture quality to the max.
Yea will do. So it appears that the 64 MB version I have is just plain faster. It likely has better memory / faster timings. But I think I found a good way to structure the video. But yea, I haven't done anything yet, just thinking.
yes i owned this back in early 2000s,"Asus v7770" cost me an arm and a leg in Australia, but boy could it play the latest games, unreal came with the card and some 3d glasses i never used, was amazing back then.never spent that percentage of money vs wages again though hehehe.. Thank's for the rehash of gaming memories.
To be fair anyone buying the Geforce 256 DDR wouldn't have been unhappy, it stonked all over the TNT2 series, the Rage series (excluding the Fury MAXX in certain circumstances) and even beat it's brother the Geforce SDR significantly. It was a card that lasted quite a while, back when GPU's were not too expensive and when you saw massive improvements upgrading even every year compared to your previous card. I'm sure I moved from a Mystique 2MB, to a VooDoo 4MB, to a TNT2 Ultra and then right up to a Geforce 2 Ultra ... in the space of 4 years. Each card was amazing at the time and made me very happy. Even the Matrox was superb with it's own awesome looking (and sounding) version of Mechwarrior 2.
Well, the Radeon 7500 came more than a year later than the GeForce 2 GTS, so it's no realistic comparison. Even the Radeon 7200 DDR and SDR came half a year later. That's why the GTS was such a great surprise.The only GPU that could conure with the GTS was the Kyro II but it lacked hardware TnL. I can still remember the day, when a workmate sat next to me in the car I was driving to work, and he read from a PC magazine how great this GPU was xD
My first nvidia card was a Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2 GTS 64 mb for my first build in 2000, a Pentium III 800 Eb, 256 mb PC 133 ram, and a whopping 30 GB hard drive! it ran GTA III so well! First graphics card was a 3DFX Voodoo Banshee 16 MB PCI.
Yes, i had one. It was my second GPU. the first one was a riva TNT (iam not sure if it was a TNT 1 or 2) i bought the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS with my confirmation money. around 440 dollars back in the day. It was a huge jump.i may i misrember it, but 2 years later, this card had problems running current games at playable fps, so it aged very fast which made me angry since it was so expensive. also, after i bought this card, 2 motherboards died on me.. i remember capacitors exploding. well, thanks to your video, i now know why
Once again Phil, Great coverage and content ;) your voice once a day Makes me complete ! haha always loved your content , you cover them well , I also love that you cover stuff that we all or at least mostly used at one time or another, I love nostalgia ! once again GREAT WORK PHIL !! cant wait to see more.. AND yes Plz do cover the 64MB version of that Ge-force id like to see the Overclock results and the gains over the 32 MB version card, Also during this time i was gunna get the Geforce2 GTS but i ended up getting the Radeon 7200 which on paper was supposed to be fasster then the GTS but sadly, after the release Nvidea released drivers that made the GTS super fast like 20% faster then stock :/ lol live n learn
Ich habe gerade eben dieses Modell (ELSA GLADIAC GF2 GTS) mit SVGA-Modul reparieren können;) Sie hatte auf der Rückseite abgeschlagene SMD Kondensatoren und Widerstände. Die Reparatur ist prima gelungen. Die Karte läuft aktuell auf einem CUBX-L mit P3-700.
Recently I just purchased one GF2GTS card in a local second-hand PC accessories exchange store, the cost is slightly less than US$7, quite a bargain for my collection purpose, also it's ASUS AGP-V7700, unfortunately detailed info for this card no longer available in ASUS website, all I can find is from several PC review websites.
Great video. I've only had experience with Nvidias TNT2 and the Geforce 2 MX400 from that time so this was a great watch :) I would love a comparison between the 32 and 64mb versions, so please make it!
I got the 64MB version from a friend and replaced my Radeon 7000. It allowed me to play call of duty and knights of the old republic finally. Great step before the FX series
The nvidia shading rasterizer is not programmable like a pixel shader; it is the nvidia equivalent of pixel tapestry: "The NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS™ performed dot3 and other per-pixel effects through its fixed-function pixel pipelines. Textures could be combined, using either single pass or multi-pass techniques, to create effects. There was no loopback, so effects that needed dependent texture reads, such as true, reflective bump mapping were simply not possible. While programmers were somewhat limited by the NSR’s fixed-function pipeline, it was possible to create superb per-pixel effects, including dot3 bump mapping so realistic looking that it seemed to have a huge amount of additional geometric detail.". And yes, it was used in some openGL games (e.g. doom 3, which functions perfectly, normal-mapping and all on a geforce 2 or geforce 256; it is very slow with 6 render passes). NSR is a marketing name for features that already existed in geforce 256.
You are correct. I used this function in one of my OpenGL homework in 2004 I think. I used it to get proper cube map reflection while being able to control how much reflection there was and how much of the base colour would be kept. IIRC the OpenGL extension was originally called register combiners and was later promoted to core OpenGL. www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Texture_Combiners www.nvidia.in/object/programmable_texture_blending.html
I've been binging your videos, and subsequently bought several Nvidia cards... My Geforce 2 GTS Pro just arrived and I'm not sure what driver would be best. Someone below said the 41.09 was best, you used the 56.72, and the latest is 71.84. I suppose it depends on the system/games. Pentium 3, playing games like UT99 and Mech3. Well, I've downloaded all 3 of the drivers so I guess it's time to try them out and see! Thanks for your videos (and on an unrelated note thanks again for the Audigy 2 help)
I have one of these in my old machine but, i can't get past the bios without a compatible keyboard, so there's also no way to install any drivers for other modules and move on. And i couldn't find what the actual keyboard is supposed to be, i suspect a Din/AT connector. Loks like a ps2 but slightly bigger like a midi. I'ts also the only output on the motherboard which is strange.
Loving these videos. Everytime I see a notification I jump right to it heh. Awesome analysis. I wonder if you have any 3dfx Voodoo cards? Edit: nevermind, found 'em! :)
There will be a V5 video at some point. But it needs an older motherboard, so it will get a unique test build, plus a few cards to compare it against, but this means a lot more work and time, so not sure when I get around to it.
This was an fantastic card back then, brings back some good memory. I used an hercules Geforce 2 ultra version (blue PCB) together with an AMD athlon 1Ghz. Little faster then the GTS but in real life you couldn't tell the difference in performance. But yeah what been told here before in that era the graphics cards evolved very fast with huge steps in performance. But nice one for an 2000-2002 retro build :)
P;dest card iv got still is a gf3 ti 200 but will sufice for my 2001 build, 512mb samsung 266mhz and audigy platinum ex kit,, got to miss the old EAX Titles.
You should build a PC with similar specs to the original XBOX and compare those two systems to each other. The original XBOX is just a PC with a 733 MHz Pentium III coppermine processor, 64 MB DDR RAM and a Nvidia GeForce3 grafics card (it is some special variation of the GeForce3, but they should be relatively similar). I think that would be an interesting video.
Hi Phil. Where did you get your stand that you use to bulding pc's in your videos. I dont have space for a ton of cases for every motherboard i own. Tanks for letting me now. Ps amazing channel. Continue with all good work. Very appericated.
I dont know what it is about the GF2 GTS cards, but its considered a favorite of mine, i have three of the 32mb versions, and one that is the 64mb version, the GTS works very well with pentium3 1ghz win98 systems.
Like! )) I have a video card with an "Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS" chip and at the bottom of the chip there is a marking "Ti VX" - what is the best driver (for Win98) to download for it? I suspect that this is NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti.
Looking at the card when you do glory shots of it in the b-roll; is it just me or does it look like the card was designed for a DVI port to be attached as an optional output?
Heheh, I actually got the GTS version of that card maybe 2 years ago. Threw it in a machine with a P3-600. I should probably turn that on again one of these days.
About the T&L benchmarks. T&L off means that CPU does all the work. Athlon64 has plenty performance to keep up with GF2. Try it on midrange PIII and the difference will be much bigger.
I still have a system running Windows 7 32 Bit on Athlon XP 1800+, 3 GB DDR1, Asus Geforce 2 GTS V700, Asus A7N8X E Deluxe, SATA SSD and a 17 inch CRT Display. I prefer Windows XP as the 3D Shutter Glasses work there.
Therefore I would say that nowadays there are not so much „game-changing” graphics cards are being presented. Maybe after GeForce256, GeForce 3, Radeon 9700PRO and somewhere after, maybe, just maybe RTX series would be the next significant step 🤔
The difference between GF2 Ti and GF3 TI you can clarly see in TES3 Morrowind, when you look at water :) I had gf4 440 and it didn't had pixel shaders :( Later i bought pretty cheap Radeon 9200 and enjoyed well with TES3 :)
Big fan of your channel! I bought a GPU like this for my Win98-PC after seeing this video, it´s a very good card! Couple of questions, though: 1. Is it possible to get Quake 1 3D-accelerated with this card? I copied Quake from my Steam-library and managed to get it running on my retro-PC but GLQuake doesn´t work. Is there any patch or anything? 2. Half-Life does weird things trying to run it. It starts up and runs nicely and looks good, but if I visit mainmenu and resume game, it slows down dramatically and sometimes the bottom-half of the screen just shows distorted colours, while upper-half is divided into two separed screens displaying the game in like 16 colours... could this be because of drivers I have (8.05)?
By the time I was using Voodoo 5 5500, and benchmark results from multiple websites indicated that voodoo 5 couldn't match gf2gts in many ways, so I kept telling myself that the performance of voodoo 5 was good enough for me, gf2gts couldn't match with voodoo 5 when it came to FSAA......
Ching-Chen Huang The Geforce 2 GTS was faster than the Voodoo 5500 but the difference was small, Voodoo 5500 is a little bit faster than Geforce 256 DDR. FSAA is alot better on the Voodoo 5500 than on any Geforce 2.
Do you find it's still safe to use XP online just for steam and downloading gog games? Or just have a new pc file transfer everything? From what everyone says online it sounds like I will get a virus within 10 seconds of connecting XP to the internet.
I've even went as far as using Discord in a Firefox browser in XP in a pinch and haven't had any issues. Probably should have just installed a light version of Linux tbh, but I was lazy. : P As long as you're limiting your access to servers you can trust (eg. _don't_ go browsing the deep web and downloading files left and right!), you shouldn't be able to pick anything up. An adblocker is also probably a must. Heck, I've got a 98 machine that technically gets internet access because it shares files over a network (and I can't find out how to make it stop connecting to the internet without disabling the file access), but I make a habit of disabling the ethernet card whenever I'm done transferring the files--no hits so far. (There's nothing of importance on the machine anyway.)
Edmundo "Get a virus within 10 seconds of connecting XP to the internet". That's pure bullshit. I haven't updated Windows 7 since 2011, so I'm supposed to get 99999999999 viruses? NOPE! I've never got a virus on my outdated copy of Win7, so XP should be perfectly safe as long as you don't act like an idiot on the internet. Just don't click any suspicious links or (definitely not) ads.
Licentious Howler Thanks, I'm thinking about building an XP system for old games. It seems opera is still well supported for the future. Would only use if for very basic downloads and windows updates with no logins or emails.
I used to use a GeForce 2 card of some sort back in the day. It was an MSI card with VGA and Composite out and Composite in. I used the Composite in to transfer VHS and Beta tapes to digital format. The quality wasn't quite as good as my ATI AiW 128 was capable of, but it did bypass the Copy Protection that the AIW balked at. All in all it was a very good card that I used until I replaced it with a Radion 9600XT. I still have it around here someplace (haven't needed in a year or so). I still use it on occasion when working on an older computer for someone that has integrated graphics.
Back the good old days were ATi put NVIDIA to shame... Now its all NVIDIA and the RADEON brand being a joke of itself every single time, At least AMD is bringing something to the CPU fight.
I'm not referring to superfast 4ns or 3.3ns ddram. I'm talking about lower tier ddram wich AIB manufacturers chose to use for cost savings. Most of the cards were shipped NEC, Eltron, and some mitsubishi and panasonic wich had really lose timings. Geforce 2 was memory bandwidth starved and the loose timing hit the perfomance really hard.
I have both the Gf2 GTS and radeon 7200 ,both in 64mb dram variant.(gts is clocked 200 core and 166 mem /and 7200 is clocked 166 core 166 mem). But the gts has the nec ic and 7200 has the samsung ic . Both stock and radeon is faster in 98% of games ,wich it shouldn't be. Nec has way to loose timings and samsung has decent/tight timings for 166mhz .
"The three letters GTS stand for gigatexel, shader, not Gran turismo sport"
Hahaha thank you, that was lovely
I remember that Halo/nvidia teaser with the marine talking about the features of the GeForce 2 GTS and all the covenant grunts freaking out
Awww, man I totally forgot about that. Would have been awesome to include :D
That gpu is fire (literally)
This was my first Nvidia card, after having used a Voodoo 2 for several years. Paired it with the AMD Athlon 600 I was running at the time. I believe I my Geforce 2 GTS was from Asus and had a yellow PCB. A great card when I got it, but 3D graphics accelerators evolved so fast back then that it was already painfully showing its age 1-2 years later.
Agree! You can run today games on a GTX 480/580. Not on the highest setting, but you can run it on pretty decent looking graphics. Very few games fom 2007 can run on a GF2 GTS from 2000.
And maybe that's a good thing. A greater focus on implementing the modern much higher compute power for other things, than just suck as much money out of gamers.
As far as I know... Life does not get better with prettier graphics in games. But maybe it can get better, if we use the power for other beneficial science stuff.
I remember Unreal Tournament 2003 already being practically unplayable on my GeForce 2 GTS. It's why I upgraded to a GeForce 4 Ti4600 in late 2002. If you look at various RUclips videos, you can see that games from 2004 like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 will barely even run on a GeForce 2. Cards from this era got outdated so ridiculously fast.
Strangely, a Radeon 97/9800 Pro can do games up to around 2007 or 2008 or so.
GeForce 2 GTS brought my gaming into a new era back in the day. 32 bit color! I bought it for a brand new coppermine PIII rig and it was blazing fast. This video really brought back some good memories.
32 bit colour was much better on Geforce rather than the TNT series, but ATI had amazing 32bit colour support long before Geforce ever came around. I remember my Rage 128 Ultra barely lost any FPS in GP500 when switching between 32 and 16 bit colour. It wasn't until Geforce 3 came around that Nvidia started to catch ATI with feasible 32bit support.
This was my first graphics card! Bought it and Sacrifice at CompUSA that day. It blew my friggin mind, my brother said we'd never need another video card again
My Geforce2 still moving RUclips at 720p
@@SargentoDuke bro stuck in 2001
I had one of these back in early 2001. I remember how amazing it was at the time. Unreal Tournament, Half Life, Quake III Arena, all the good games, at 1024x768 with good frame rates. Makes me want to build a 2001~2003 era gaming rig.
I vividly remember that it run Black & White really well, unlike Voodo 2
Sadly the V5 5500 and 4500 are missing from the benchmarks. In the year 2000 the main rivals of the GF 2 GTS and MX were the V5 5500 and 4500.
I used to own an Asus V7700 back in 2001. Paid 650.000 Italian Lire for it, which is about 600 euros today. It was 3d and had wired shutterglasses. Quake in 3d was really impressive. When an ogre threw a bomb at me, more than once I literally ducked!
That's a disgusting price, even given the inflation rate. Over here it was around £200 for a GTS Pro on launch, around 250 euros? Lets call it 320 given inflation. For 500 euros you could have had a Geforce 2 Ultra, which was WAY overpriced back in the day.
Looks like the Italians got bumfucked regarding parts back then.
shit dude that cards still 30-50 bucks online.
@@swahiliranger1022 picked one up for 7,50 local lol
damn you deserve at least 150k SUBS
Imho is that 99.99% of those people (subs) are not the sharpest knives available.
This is a great channel for us enthusiasts that enjoy facts over la-la-land.
Brings back great memories to see these parts from the past!
Man, im starting with the retro scene like 2 months ago and you have plaged youtube with a lot of good videos, a lot of times when i search for info you have a video related to what im looking for.
Really appreciate your work!
One of these with a fast Athlon was a great setup around the turn of the millennium.
This was my first ever 3D accelerated card. Well, not counting an onboard S3 ProSavage on the first machine I built, because thay was more a 3d decelerator. Anyway, awesome to see you looking at a card i have such fond memories of
Mine was the 64mb version as well. Got it when it was already kind of old, as a cheap option instead of a geforce 3
God that you missed the actual graphics decelerator, the S3 Virge.
Your Videos are amazing! :)
afaik GTA III does not support Hardware TnL. You just need a fast CPU and fillrate.
I have a GeForce 2 GTS in my PII-450 Windows 98 retro build, and the difference between Hardware and Software T&L is dramatic on slower CPUs. It's pretty much a 100% performance boost in my particular case, since the GPU is so much more powerful than the CPU is (two years was a long time back in that era)!
Any idea if it will play ff7 the old PC version?
"and the difference between Hardware and Software T&L is dramatic on slower CPUs. It's pretty much a 100% performance boost in my particular case, since the GPU is so much more powerful than the CPU is"
talk more!
@@polariszene8542 I haven't tried that out, but I do have the FF7 demo kicking around on an old magazine cover disc somewhere. My guess is that it will probably need older drivers to work properly.
I just got a GeForce 2 GTS to replace my Radeon. 7500. Mine is a gimped version that has less cores, and slower memory, it’s also a PCI version. I originally got it because the motherboard I had only had PCI and no AGP. I recently picked up a new slot 1 board that has AGP and am excited to try it out.
Also good against the covenant.
First Graphics card i ever bought, didnt even have a computer of my own at that point, used it on my little brother computer, before i got my first own pc, 1000mhz Duron build.
Nice. I just got one in. Looks like yours with the "Millennium" fan, but the cooler is in anodized green. 😜
Overclocking 15+ year-old hardware. That's a blast from the past for me.
I wanted to buy a GTS back in 2000 but couldn't afford one, however, i did get a Geforce 2 MX a few years later, instead of a GTS because i couldn't buy the GTS anymore when i could afford it, which replaced my Voodoo 2. I did get a little bit nostalgic when i saw those Geforce 2 Tech Demos, at the end of your video. I remembered seeing them featured in computer magazines at the time. Wow, Magical!!
Cool Video! I have one of these driving my 98 machine!
Interesting card, indeed! :)
Thanks for the awesome video, Phil!
I had a GeForce 2 gts pro. Only difference is that the DDR is clocked at 200MHz instead of 166MHz of the base gts
I had it too. It was in my first PC. CPU was AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz. I bought the CPU as 1.2 but it was easy to clock it 200Mhz higher. Those were the days.
According to this video, you shouldn't say just "Only" 😂 that memory overclock test made a notable difference
Good job on your website driver page, it's a great reference for retro-computer guys! Found a GeForce2 Ultra in a thrift store bin a few months ago, I think for $5 or less. It's now part of my K6-2+ 570ACZ DFI AT gaming rig!
Great find!
1:44- they have more mistake there. Release date for Geforce 256 DDR was actually in november or december 1999. SDR version went out month earlier. For sure, in august 1999, card was not yet out.
The shaders were probably used mostly for implementing the multitexturing/blending combination hell that was DX7.
I vaguely remember you could just go piling up combination over combination over combination.
Αnother card that I paid so much money back then and didnt actually enjoyed it.
Mine was 64mb inside a big black box having a T-Rex on the back.
It came after several voodoos and tnt's that passed from my hands.
Believe me guys,nothing can beat the Voodoo on what it did back then,pc gaming became interesting again for me after 2006 with the xbox 360 style graphics.
Vasileios yeah between 2003 to 2006 pc gaming was pritty lame, bad console ports. It wasnt until crysis came out that ot got me back to pc gaming
Are you crazy haha 2004 alone had far cry doom 3 Rome total war half life 2 the chronicals of riddick unreal tournament 2004 etc..
I would say the software rendering example was unfair. At the time your high CPU would have been an Intel P3 866 or an Athlon 1Ghz, which the hardware would have creamed those two.
Overall great video really loved seeing these things again from my past.
Back in the days I got a bleeding edge Athlon 500 on an Asus K7M (I believe that was the Version) with 128MB RAM and a GeForce 256 DDR 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro.
The slot A platform was just released so I got my new motherboard in a plain white cardboard box...
I remember my first overclocking attempts using a goldfinger device after cutting a hole the case of the processor...
I went with the ForeWare 41.09 for my GeForce 3.
After some benchmarks I saw close to 30% performance increase over the 56.73 driver.
Doom 3 uses the NSR technology for its lighting. It's how it runs on the GeForce 4MX and GeForce 2 while looking like Doom 3. It only lacks the heat distortion effects.
And pixel shader 1.0 was still quite limited and only a minor step up from something like the NSR or GameCube's TEV.
Please do the 32MB vs 64MB comparison!
I'll see. It would be a super short video though :D
32MB vs 64MB is a tricky thing to benchmark.
I remember many websites back then claiming 64MB were useless. However if you use the correct approach you can see the difference.
You need to benchmark not just the average frame rate, but the minimum one too. When a 3D card runs out of memory due to the frame buffer usage and texture usage, the card will start to struggle and will copy the textures back and forth between the system memory and the card memory (aka texture trashing).
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrashing_(computer_science)
The q3dm9 map in Quake 3 for example has a few sections where 32MB is just not enough and the frame rate collapses from 40fps to 5fps. It got better once NVIDIA correctly implemented AGP texturing in their later drivers, lowering the need to transfer the textures back and forth as the textures could be directly accessed via the AGP bus. Nonetheless there is still a perceivable difference.
I remember the perfect spot in q3dm9 to observe this difference. I'll also believe some people made some demos showing this problem. For example Quaver demo:
alt.3dcenter.org/downloads/quake3-quaver.php
Be sure to disable texture compression and push the texture quality to the max.
PhilsComputerLab please do. See comment above :-)
You can see Anandtech article for some benchmarks on this
www.anandtech.com/show/523/11
Yea will do. So it appears that the 64 MB version I have is just plain faster. It likely has better memory / faster timings. But I think I found a good way to structure the video. But yea, I haven't done anything yet, just thinking.
I run this in my Retro Windows 95 machine, works really good!
yes i owned this back in early 2000s,"Asus v7770" cost me an arm and a leg in Australia, but boy could it play the latest games, unreal came with the card and some 3d glasses i never used, was amazing back then.never spent that percentage of money vs wages again though hehehe.. Thank's for the rehash of gaming memories.
To be fair anyone buying the Geforce 256 DDR wouldn't have been unhappy, it stonked all over the TNT2 series, the Rage series (excluding the Fury MAXX in certain circumstances) and even beat it's brother the Geforce SDR significantly.
It was a card that lasted quite a while, back when GPU's were not too expensive and when you saw massive improvements upgrading even every year compared to your previous card.
I'm sure I moved from a Mystique 2MB, to a VooDoo 4MB, to a TNT2 Ultra and then right up to a Geforce 2 Ultra ... in the space of 4 years. Each card was amazing at the time and made me very happy. Even the Matrox was superb with it's own awesome looking (and sounding) version of Mechwarrior 2.
Well, the Radeon 7500 came more than a year later than the GeForce 2 GTS, so it's no realistic comparison. Even the Radeon 7200 DDR and SDR came half a year later. That's why the GTS was such a great surprise.The only GPU that could conure with the GTS was the Kyro II but it lacked hardware TnL.
I can still remember the day, when a workmate sat next to me in the car I was driving to work, and he read from a PC magazine how great this GPU was xD
My first nvidia card was a Leadtek Winfast GeForce 2 GTS 64 mb for my first build in 2000, a Pentium III 800 Eb, 256 mb PC 133 ram, and a whopping 30 GB hard drive! it ran GTA III so well! First graphics card was a 3DFX Voodoo Banshee 16 MB PCI.
Yes, i had one. It was my second GPU. the first one was a riva TNT (iam not sure if it was a TNT 1 or 2) i bought the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS with my confirmation money. around 440 dollars back in the day. It was a huge jump.i may i misrember it, but 2 years later, this card had problems running current games at playable fps, so it aged very fast which made me angry since it was so expensive. also, after i bought this card, 2 motherboards died on me.. i remember capacitors exploding. well, thanks to your video, i now know why
Once again Phil, Great coverage and content ;) your voice once a day Makes me complete ! haha always loved your content , you cover them well , I also love that you cover stuff that we all or at least mostly used at one time or another, I love nostalgia ! once again GREAT WORK PHIL !! cant wait to see more.. AND yes Plz do cover the 64MB version of that Ge-force id like to see the Overclock results and the gains over the 32 MB version card, Also during this time i was gunna get the Geforce2 GTS but i ended up getting the Radeon 7200 which on paper was supposed to be fasster then the GTS but sadly, after the release Nvidea released drivers that made the GTS super fast like 20% faster then stock :/ lol live n learn
Thank you! Yea looks like I will do a video on 32 MB vs 64 MB :)
Ich habe gerade eben dieses Modell (ELSA GLADIAC GF2 GTS) mit SVGA-Modul reparieren können;) Sie hatte auf der Rückseite abgeschlagene SMD Kondensatoren und Widerstände. Die Reparatur ist prima gelungen. Die Karte läuft aktuell auf einem CUBX-L mit P3-700.
Super Gute Arbeit!
I owned one of these…. I ‘upgraded’ to a GeForce 4 MX. It was not an upgrade 😅. Great card
Recently I just purchased one GF2GTS card in a local second-hand PC accessories exchange store, the cost is slightly less than US$7, quite a bargain for my collection purpose, also it's ASUS AGP-V7700, unfortunately detailed info for this card no longer available in ASUS website, all I can find is from several PC review websites.
I had that GTS 2 pro with 32mb of ram, it was impressive in Rally Sport Challenge. The game was full with that 1800xp amd
Great video. I've only had experience with Nvidias TNT2 and the Geforce 2 MX400 from that time so this was a great watch :)
I would love a comparison between the 32 and 64mb versions, so please make it!
Ok, cool!
I got the 64MB version from a friend and replaced my Radeon 7000. It allowed me to play call of duty and knights of the old republic finally. Great step before the FX series
Yeah, the FX series was a huge misstep.
So glad ATI struck back with the Radeon 9K series...
I heve the reference GeForce 2 Ultra...always wanted to have it back in the day...
The nvidia shading rasterizer is not programmable like a pixel shader; it is the nvidia equivalent of pixel tapestry: "The NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS™ performed dot3 and other per-pixel effects through its fixed-function pixel pipelines. Textures could be combined, using either single pass or multi-pass techniques, to create effects. There was no loopback, so effects that needed dependent texture reads, such as true, reflective bump mapping were simply not possible. While programmers were somewhat limited by the NSR’s fixed-function pipeline, it was possible to create superb per-pixel effects, including dot3 bump mapping so realistic looking that it seemed to have a huge amount of additional geometric detail.".
And yes, it was used in some openGL games (e.g. doom 3, which functions perfectly, normal-mapping and all on a geforce 2 or geforce 256; it is very slow with 6 render passes). NSR is a marketing name for features that already existed in geforce 256.
You are correct.
I used this function in one of my OpenGL homework in 2004 I think. I used it to get proper cube map reflection while being able to control how much reflection there was and how much of the base colour would be kept.
IIRC the OpenGL extension was originally called register combiners and was later promoted to core OpenGL.
www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Texture_Combiners
www.nvidia.in/object/programmable_texture_blending.html
I've been binging your videos, and subsequently bought several Nvidia cards...
My Geforce 2 GTS Pro just arrived and I'm not sure what driver would be best. Someone below said the 41.09 was best, you used the 56.72, and the latest is 71.84. I suppose it depends on the system/games. Pentium 3, playing games like UT99 and Mech3.
Well, I've downloaded all 3 of the drivers so I guess it's time to try them out and see!
Thanks for your videos (and on an unrelated note thanks again for the Audigy 2 help)
I have one of these in my old machine but, i can't get past the bios without a compatible keyboard, so there's also no way to install any drivers for other modules and move on. And i couldn't find what the actual keyboard is supposed to be, i suspect a Din/AT connector. Loks like a ps2 but slightly bigger like a midi. I'ts also the only output on the motherboard which is strange.
Loving these videos. Everytime I see a notification I jump right to it heh. Awesome analysis. I wonder if you have any 3dfx Voodoo cards? Edit: nevermind, found 'em! :)
There will be a V5 video at some point. But it needs an older motherboard, so it will get a unique test build, plus a few cards to compare it against, but this means a lot more work and time, so not sure when I get around to it.
This was an fantastic card back then, brings back some good memory. I used an hercules Geforce 2 ultra version (blue PCB) together with an AMD athlon 1Ghz. Little faster then the GTS but in real life you couldn't tell the difference in performance. But yeah what been told here before in that era the graphics cards evolved very fast with huge steps in performance. But nice one for an 2000-2002 retro build :)
Ah yes, the blue Hercules cards, very nice.
P;dest card iv got still is a gf3 ti 200 but will sufice for my 2001 build, 512mb samsung 266mhz and audigy platinum ex kit,, got to miss the old EAX Titles.
Does it have a CPU...? LOL
xp 1900+ on asus kt 266a chipset, have a few later xp cpu's and boards but these are 2001 earlier i chosen to use
Still got 2 asus v7700 tvr.s lying around both are 32mb . And a Hercules 3d prophet ll 64mb GTS there are great retro cards
They
You should build a PC with similar specs to the original XBOX and compare those two systems to each other. The original XBOX is just a PC with a 733 MHz Pentium III coppermine processor, 64 MB DDR RAM and a Nvidia GeForce3 grafics card (it is some special variation of the GeForce3, but they should be relatively similar). I think that would be an interesting video.
Basically, it's a GF3 with _GF4_-like specs.
SolarstrikeVG It's between the Geforce3 and Geforce 3 Ti 500. And it has slow memory, because it shares 64 MB DDR RAM with the rest of the system.
Oh.
I was given an old PC by a co-worker and it had a Geforce2 GTS Pro 64MB in it and it works fine but I haven't put it through much gaming time.
Hi Phil. Where did you get your stand that you use to bulding pc's in your videos. I dont have space for a ton of cases for every motherboard i own. Tanks for letting me now. Ps amazing channel. Continue with all good work. Very appericated.
I dont know what it is about the GF2 GTS cards, but its considered a favorite of mine, i have three of the 32mb versions, and one that is the 64mb version, the GTS works very well with pentium3 1ghz win98 systems.
Like! )) I have a video card with an "Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS" chip and at the bottom of the chip there is a marking "Ti VX" - what is the best driver (for Win98) to download for it? I suspect that this is NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti.
Looking at the card when you do glory shots of it in the b-roll; is it just me or does it look like the card was designed for a DVI port to be attached as an optional output?
Yes the card came in various configurations. Some with DVI, some with TV out or both.
I had the 3D Prophet from Guillemot. Looked much nicer ;)
I had a Leadtek GeForce 2 Pro 64MB, when they came out :) was amazing back then
Heheh, I actually got the GTS version of that card maybe 2 years ago. Threw it in a machine with a P3-600. I should probably turn that on again one of these days.
I have the Ti version now, as I collect cards, tried to get the pro again, but couldn't find one in the leadtek version :)
About the T&L benchmarks. T&L off means that CPU does all the work. Athlon64 has plenty performance to keep up with GF2. Try it on midrange PIII and the difference will be much bigger.
That was what I wanted to test. On a GeForce256, the hardware TnL hold you back with a fast CPU. But not on the GeForce2, it has much stronger TnL.
Ok, now I can see your point. Much higher GPU clock and poor memory performance on GF2 may be the cause.
How do you get so high score on 3d mark 2000,i only got 7450 score.I have same card with pentium 3 1.2ghz.
Pardon my ignorance, but are current Radeon graphics cards still better performance for price than Nvidia's GeForce cards?
Just picked this up and Voodoo 2 card for $6 at Goodwill
I still have this card, not using it though! I had TV out on mine also!
I still have a system running Windows 7 32 Bit on Athlon XP 1800+, 3 GB DDR1, Asus Geforce 2 GTS V700, Asus A7N8X E Deluxe, SATA SSD and a 17 inch CRT Display. I prefer Windows XP as the 3D Shutter Glasses work there.
Therefore I would say that nowadays there are not so much „game-changing” graphics cards are being presented. Maybe after GeForce256, GeForce 3, Radeon 9700PRO and somewhere after, maybe, just maybe RTX series would be the next significant step 🤔
The difference between GF2 Ti and GF3 TI you can clarly see in TES3 Morrowind, when you look at water :) I had gf4 440 and it didn't had pixel shaders :( Later i bought pretty cheap Radeon 9200 and enjoyed well with TES3 :)
my 1st gpu was a g2mx400 pci
Big fan of your channel! I bought a GPU like this for my Win98-PC after seeing this video, it´s a very good card! Couple of questions, though:
1. Is it possible to get Quake 1 3D-accelerated with this card? I copied Quake from my Steam-library and managed to get it running on my retro-PC but GLQuake doesn´t work. Is there any patch or anything?
2. Half-Life does weird things trying to run it. It starts up and runs nicely and looks good, but if I visit mainmenu and resume game, it slows down dramatically and sometimes the bottom-half of the screen just shows distorted colours, while upper-half is divided into two separed screens displaying the game in like 16 colours... could this be because of drivers I have (8.05)?
By the time I was using Voodoo 5 5500, and benchmark results from multiple websites indicated that voodoo 5 couldn't match gf2gts in many ways, so I kept telling myself that the performance of voodoo 5 was good enough for me, gf2gts couldn't match with voodoo 5 when it came to FSAA......
Ching-Chen Huang The Geforce 2 GTS was faster than the Voodoo 5500 but the difference was small, Voodoo 5500 is a little bit faster than Geforce 256 DDR. FSAA is alot better on the Voodoo 5500 than on any Geforce 2.
I just realized that I have the rarer 64MB version of this card 😁
Do you find it's still safe to use XP online just for steam and downloading gog games? Or just have a new pc file transfer everything?
From what everyone says online it sounds like I will get a virus within 10 seconds of connecting XP to the internet.
Haven't noticed anything. Once the games are activated once, I just use Steam in offline mode when benchmarking.
I've even went as far as using Discord in a Firefox browser in XP in a pinch and haven't had any issues. Probably should have just installed a light version of Linux tbh, but I was lazy. : P
As long as you're limiting your access to servers you can trust (eg. _don't_ go browsing the deep web and downloading files left and right!), you shouldn't be able to pick anything up. An adblocker is also probably a must.
Heck, I've got a 98 machine that technically gets internet access because it shares files over a network (and I can't find out how to make it stop connecting to the internet without disabling the file access), but I make a habit of disabling the ethernet card whenever I'm done transferring the files--no hits so far. (There's nothing of importance on the machine anyway.)
Edmundo "Get a virus within 10 seconds of connecting XP to the internet". That's pure bullshit. I haven't updated Windows 7 since 2011, so I'm supposed to get 99999999999 viruses? NOPE! I've never got a virus on my outdated copy of Win7, so XP should be perfectly safe as long as you don't act like an idiot on the internet. Just don't click any suspicious links or (definitely not) ads.
PhilsComputerLab Thanks for the info!
Licentious Howler Thanks, I'm thinking about building an XP system for old games. It seems opera is still well supported for the future. Would only use if for very basic downloads and windows updates with no logins or emails.
Then what to choose for a P-III-933 ? GF2-GTS-32mb or GF3-ti200-128mb?
Lots of things to consider, not an easy answer.
True that... A bit more power, or going era correct.
GF3 will be faster and has more VRAM, so if you already have one, that would be an easy choice.
Would a Hercules GeForce 2 ti 64 mb be a good card for win 98 gaming
Also cpu p3 Tualatin 1.4 ghz 512 mb ram
I used to use a GeForce 2 card of some sort back in the day. It was an MSI card with VGA and Composite out and Composite in. I used the Composite in to transfer VHS and Beta tapes to digital format. The quality wasn't quite as good as my ATI AiW 128 was capable of, but it did bypass the Copy Protection that the AIW balked at. All in all it was a very good card that I used until I replaced it with a Radion 9600XT. I still have it around here someplace (haven't needed in a year or so). I still use it on occasion when working on an older computer for someone that has integrated graphics.
Haha had a geforce 2 ultra when I got an alienware back in the day a REAL ALIENWARE not the dell. Same mobo too
Ultra fast :D
I actually have a GeForce 2 gts 64mb card
I have the Geforce 2 GTS Pro Version (MSI 8831 G2Pro Plus-T64D) with 64MB and 400MHz DDR RAM. The core clock is identical to the classic GTS Version.
Do in 1920x1080
nVidia GeForce pre-6 series does not support Aero.
But does it run Halo?
Of course it does. Halo runs already on geforce 1. Piece of cake.
@@carbonara2144 I was making a reference to the old halo nvidia ad. ruclips.net/video/meLg7jSHT20/видео.html
@@slipangle3027 Awesome :) I learned something today.
lmao that's the cut down DELL version.
Back the good old days were ATi put NVIDIA to shame...
Now its all NVIDIA and the RADEON brand being a joke of itself every single time, At least AMD is bringing something to the CPU fight.
Too bad Vega turned out to be a disappointment...
The bad part about geforce2 in general , is they were shipped with crappy memory !
I'm not sure if there was much better memory available at the time?
I'm not referring to superfast 4ns or 3.3ns ddram. I'm talking about lower tier ddram wich AIB manufacturers chose to use for cost savings. Most of the cards were shipped NEC, Eltron, and some mitsubishi and panasonic wich had really lose timings. Geforce 2 was memory bandwidth starved and the loose timing hit the perfomance really hard.
Apart from BIOS tools, is there a way to show the memory timings? The card I have uses Infineon memory.
I have both the Gf2 GTS and radeon 7200 ,both in 64mb dram variant.(gts is clocked 200 core and 166 mem /and 7200 is clocked 166 core 166 mem). But the gts has the nec ic and 7200 has the samsung ic . Both stock and radeon is faster in 98% of games ,wich it shouldn't be. Nec has way to loose timings and samsung has decent/tight timings for 166mhz .
check on google the ic mem. id. In data sheets you'll find the timing wich those mem. are rated for use.
Megatexel
Explain yourselves, 3 dis-likers.
FanATIcs probably.
GTS wasn't first in geforce 2 line:
Models:
GeForce MX Series
GeForce GTS Series
GeForce Pro Series
GeForce Ti Series
GeForce Ultra Series