GeForce 2 Pro

Written by - on 05 November 2009. Posted in GeForce 2 series

The GeForce2 GTS core, announced in April 2000, seemed to be just a GeForce 256 with a 0.18 micron process technology. All the same 4 rendering pipelines, but the GeForce2 has two texture units on each of them, while the GeForce 256 has only one. Thus, even if the chips had the same frequencies, in the multitexturing mode, the fill rate of the GeForce2 would be twice as high as that of the GeForce 256. Since the chip is manufactured using a 0.18 micron process technology, it became possible to increase the core frequency to 200MHz. However, with all these improvements compared to the previous chip, the GeForce2's performance was not as high as one might expect.

GeForce 2 Pro chip

The reason for this is insufficient memory bandwidth. To make the difference between the GeForce2 Ultra and the GTS, Nvidia raised the core clock to 250MHz. The memory frequency was also increased, although the performance gain was not very significant, but after all, it was necessary to somehow justify the cost of cards based on this chip at 0. GeForce2 Pro is positioned as a solution that is faster than the GeForce2 GTS and less powerful and cheaper than GeForce2 Ultra and has a core running at 200MHz, i.e. the middle variant. At this frequency, the maximum fillrate is 1.6GTexel/s, but it did not rise to this value due to the same limitations imposed by the memory bandwidth.

The only difference between the GeForce2 Pro and the GTS was the 20% increased memory frequency - 200MHz DDR (400MHz effective), instead of 166MHz DDR (333MHz effective). Thanks to this memory frequency, its theoretical bandwidth was 6.4GB/s versus 5.3GB/s for the GeForce2 GTS and 7.36GB/s for the GeForce2 Ultra. Using the "old" chip in cards based on the GeForce2 Pro, nVidia made life much easier, while the GeForce2 Ultra used a new core capable of operating at a higher frequency.

Features GeForce 2 PRO

Name	GeForce 2 PRO
Core	NV15
Process technology (µm)	0.18
Transistors (million)	25
Core frequency	200
Memory frequency (DDR)	200 (400)
Bus and memory type	DDR-128bit
Bandwidth (Gb/s)	6.4
Pixel pipelines	4
TMU per conveyor	2
textures per clock	8
textures per pass	2
Vertex conveyors	No
Pixel Shaders	0.5 (emulation)
Vertex Shaders	1.0 (emulation)
Fill Rate (Mpix/s)	800
Fill Rate (Mtex/s)	1600
DirectX	7.0
Anti-Aliasing (Max)	SS-4x
Anisotropic Filtering (Max)	2x
Memory	32 / 64 MB
Interface	AGP4x
RAMDAC	350MHz

Priced at around $0, the GeForce2 Pro filled the gap created by the declining prices of the GeForce2 GTS and the high price of the GeForce2 Ultra. The performance gain on the Ultra boards did not justify their high price,

GeForce 2 Pro