Chaintech has decided that it is more efficient to use NVIDIA's official drivers, and ditch the idea of releasing their own set of drivers. Many people upgrade to NVIDIA's latest drivers anyway, explaining why Chaintech took this route and why it's not too big of a deal.

The RI-91 was able to remain stable with the GPU clocked at 230MHz, and the memory at 180MHz (360MHz effective). This speed range is where most of the GeForce2 cards land, so there is no disappointment for the RI-91. Overclocking was done via the popular coolbits registry hack, which allowed us to define GPU and memory frequency. This card was a bit picky about the speed at which it ran. At 245/170MHz the card displayed no artifacts in Quake 3, but would lock up after about twenty minutes of timedemo looping. Remember that overclocking is never guaranteed and results will vary among all cards. Visit our GeForce2 GTS Overclocking Guide for more information.

OpenGL performance is just as expected. RI-91 performs virtually identical to the SUMA Platinum, which is a 64MB GeForce2 card as well. The GeForce2 32MB cards are slightly faster at low resolutions due to the faster SGRAM chips. A reserve of power is available at virtually all resolutions, and the card manages to spit out just a bit under 45FPS at 1600x1200x32. We can see a constant gain in FPS because Quake 3 balances CPU speed and Video Card fill-rate very well; this also makes it an excellent benchmark.

Direct3D Performance - Unreal Tournament - Athlon 750

This Direct3D benchmark has always portrayed 3dfx cards as speed leaders. The RI-91 starts to show full power of the GeForce2 chip at 1280x1024x32. Playing at 1600x1200x16 suddenly becomes a reality. 50FPS at this resolution is more then most gamers can ask for. Unreal Tournament gains more FPS from CPU speed, rather then the Video Card, which can offset our benchmark scores dramatically.

The RI-91 is heavily targeted towards gamers, but 2D image quality is just as important as smooth 3D gameplay. It's a fact that an average computer user spends more then 75% of his computer time staring at 2D figures, such as web pages and text lines. Its also a well known fact that NVIDIA doesn't have the best "2D record" in the industry, and manufacturers such as Matrox, 3dfx and ATI have always surpassed NVIDIA in this field. However, it should be noted that NVIDIA cannot be blamed directly for this problem because the fault lies in the filters that board manufacturers use, and not with the RAMDAC on the NVIDIA chip. Not surprisingly, the manufacturers with the best 2D image quality happen to produce the boards and the chips themselves. This gives them an advantage, which ultimately results in a better 2D reproduction. Knowing the hard facts we equipped ourselves with a brand new Samsung SyncMaster 955DF display and performed a series of 2D image quality tests.

We chose 3 popular programs as our 2D benchmarks; Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Adobe GoLive 4.0, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 (Random web pages). The reasoning behind this choice of benchmarking applications is very simple: maximize the variety of 2D models used, which in our case range from simple HTML text, to advanced 2D images. For comparison, we chose the Matrox G400 and the 3dfx Voodoo3 3000.

At 640x480x32 (120Hz) all cards performed very well, although the G400 stood out under Adobe Photoshop as it produced a more saturated picture. The difference becomes more noticeable as we bump the resolution to 1024x768x32 (100Hz), in which case the G400 was a whole step ahead of the RI-91 in every test. At 1152x864x32 (85Hz) the RI-91 met its end, and produced a non-impressive picture that came nowhere near the G400. Very high resolutions such as 1280x1024x32 (75Hz) and 1600x1200x32 (60Hz) showed the most difference in which the RI-91 produced a series of tiny blurry horizontal lines, while the G400 was still on top of all benchmarks. Voodoo3 was somewhat better then the RI-91, but still nowhere near the G400.

Chaintech is good at keeping company traditions. Their tradition of producing "plain gaming cards" has not changed. It soon becomes quite obvious that Chaintech didn't shoot for the top, and this card is targeted towards those looking for a GeForce2 GTS at a good price. Chaintech has done a great job in cutting cost, without cutting corners. They have brought the card price down without sacrificing valuable performance, stability, or reliability.

Please note that this card is rated against similar GeForce2 64MB cards. To learn more about our rating system, please click here