Hardware antialiasing (FSAA)

The GeForce 3 has built in hardware antialiasing. This removes the "jaggies" that appear at the edges of images in a game. This is accomplished rendering at a higher resolution (2x-4x higher), and then down sampling the image to your desired resolution. While this has been available in software for some time, the GeForce3 does this in hardware allowing for much less of a performance hit. The newest alliteration of FSAA, Quincunx, is supposed to offer higher visual quality than that of a mix between 2x & 4x, yet pose much less of a performance impact.

The card

The card that Visiontek sent us, which is an exact replica of the reference design, is somewhat larger than the original GeForce2 GTS. The most notable of my observations whilst conducting my examination of this card would be the inclusion of more aggressive cooling techniques. Heatsinks are placed on each DDR SDRAM chip, not to mention the larger heatsink and fan on of the processor itself. We also noticed that after about 30 minutes of inactivity the onboard fan would actually shut off. This is great because the fan created a substantial amount of noise.

Overclocking

As per our tests the overclocking capability of this card was somewhat limited. Using the "coolbits" registry hack we were able to unlock the needed clock settings toolbar. Attempting to squeeze every ounce of juice possible from this card we were able to simply overclock the core and memory to 230/510MHz.

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