ASUS V7700 GeForce 2 GTS

With the release of the GeForce 2 GTS it seems that NVIDIA has finally nailed their product release cycle down. Similar to the way video card manufacturers responded to announcement of the GeForce 256 chip, almost every major video card manufacturer has announced GeForce 2 GTS based cards. Unlike the GeForce 256, however, this time the cards are actually getting into the consumer's hands. The lag that was present between chip announcement and consumer use in the case of the GeForce 256 is all but gone now: consumers can readily purchase one of these powerhouse cards a mere few weeks after the chip's announcement.

Not only is this exciting on the consumer front, with new technology easily obtainable and competition on the rise, it is also exciting on the manufacturer's level. In a shotgun approach, almost every video card manufacturer has run out in an attempt to be one of the first GeForce 2 GTS based cards on the market. Due to this, it is necessary for a card manufacturer to do everything in their power to set their product apart from the rest of the reference design world, as we have seen with other GeForce 2 GTS cards out there. With the release of their newest video card, the GeForce 2 GTS based V7700, ASUS has done what other manufacturers are doing in order to prevent total annihilation in this new market: adding additional features. ELSA has done this with the GLADIAC and its impressive 6-year warranty as well as the Best Select software bundle. It appears that Hercules plans to do this with RAM heatsinks on the 3D Prophet II. GTS. How does ASUS plan to ensure success? Let's take a look at what it is about this card that allows it to stand out from the reference design board as well as how the card rates overall.

Features

• AGP 4x/2x with Fast Writes
• Four new Hypertexel pipelines process two texture per pixel, in true color, at full speed up to 1.6 Gtexel fill rate
• Built-in 32 MB high speed DDR video memory with up to 5.3 GB/sec bandwidth
• Eight texture mapped, lit pixels per clock cycle
• Second generation Transform and Lighting (T&L) Engine
• Up to 25 million triangles per second at peak rates
• Optimized for Direct3D acceleration with complete support for DirectX 7 features such as multi-texturing, bump mapping, light maps, reflection maps, full scene anti-aliasing, trilinear and 8-tap anisotropic filtering (better than trilinear mipmapping)
• Fully 1.2 compliant OpenGL support
• 32-bit colors, Z/stencil buffer
• Multi-buffering (double, triple, quad buffering) for smooth animation and video playback
• Multiple video windows with hardware color space conversion and filtering (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
• Integrated 350 MHz RAMDAC supporting from 640x480 up to 2048x1536 in true color
• BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) support
• Video acceleration for Direct Show and MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and Indeo
• SmartDoctor Technologies with fan RPM monitoring, AGP power level monitoring, over-heat protection, and dynamic overclocking
• Software bundle including ASUSDVD 2000, Darkan, Rollcage, and 12 other game demo