As far as video card manufactures are concerned, at the lab, Leadtek is still considered to be one of the new kids on the block. The company has always been a diverse one, as can be seen with their current product line up: it includes not only 3D gaming cards but also professional video cards. However, it was not until the release of the TNT2 based S320 that Leadtek made a big impression on the 3D gaming market, as this card was one of the first (if not the first) TNT2 cards to arrive on the scene. When NVIDIA announced the release of the GeForce processor, Leadtek once again jumped into the 3D gaming market by producing one of the first GeForce cards: the WinFast GeForce 256 SDR card.

Besides being the first TNT2 card on the market, the S320 did not make any waves as far as design and performance are concerned, as the card was almost identical to every other TNT2 card based on the NVIDIA reference design. The question that remains is whether Leadtek will once again produce a midrange video card, as it did with the S320 in order to beat the market rush, or if the the WinFast GeForce 256 SDR will stand out from the pack. It appears that Leadtek has produced the same results with the WinFast GeForce 256 SDR as it did with the S320, but this time there are a few extras which set this card apart.

Specifications, courtesy of Leadtek:

• 2D and 3D Features
  NVIDIA GeForce 256, 256-bit GPU
  Quake Engine Design for complete 3D Pipeline
  15 Million triangles/sec
  480 Million Pixel/sec Fill rate
  350 MHz RAMDAC support display resolution up to 2048x1536
  32-bit Z-buffer/stencil
  Optimized for Direct3D acceleration with complete hardware support for DirectX 7
  Cube Environment Mapping
  Full OpenGL 1.2 ICD driver support
  32 bits true color texture mapping support
  Hardware Transform and Lighting
  Optional Digital Flat Panel interface with scaling and filtering for flat panels up to 1600x1200
  TV-out support up to 800x600 resolution
  Full PC99 and PC99a compliant
• Driver Support
  Microsoft Windows 9x, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000 driver support
  Microsoft DirectX 7.0 for windows 9x/2000, OpenGL IDC for Windows 9x/2000/NT 4.0
• Video Acceleration
  DVD and HDTV-ready motion compensation for MPEG-2 decoding
  DVD sub-picture alpha blended composting
  Hardware YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0 color space conversion support
  Multi-tap X and Y filtering
  8:1 up and down scaling on video overlay
  Industry's first 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical video filtering
  Supports planar YUV12 (4:2:0) to/from packed (4:2:2) conversion for software MPEG acceleration
  Video acceleration for DirectShow, MPEG-2 and MPEG-1
• Drivers and Utilities
  WHQL-qualified drivers Optimized for Pentium III SSE and AMD 3D NOW
  With Leadtek's user-friendly Windows 9x Control Panel (WinFast Settings), you can adjust the gama correction, Direct3D and OpenGL controls and fine tune performance with our Speed Runner utility (overclocking tool)
• Bundled Software
  MPEG-2 (DVD) Player (WinDVD)
  Colorific (for fine-tuning color calibration)
  3Deep (for accurate adjustment of color matching between monitor and printer)
  WEB 3D from Asymetrix
  WIRL from Platinum
  VRCreator from Platinum
  3D/FX from Asymetrix
  RealiMation STE (Demo) from Datapath
  Microsoft Internet Explorer
  Digital Video Producer from Asymetrix
  VDOLive Video Player from VDOnet
• Package Contents
  WinFast 3D GeForce Graphics card
  User's Manual
  Driver and Utility CD
  CD with Software DVD player
  Bonus Pack CDs
  S-Video Cable