Observations

Unreal Tournament

It seems like Geforce cards had always had trouble with the Unreal Tournament engine. From the very first time I tried it with my old Hercules Geforce DDR, there were issues. However, during this round of testing, I could only find two issues remaining. The first was the resolution switching problem, and the second was one that plagued all the Nvidia cards I'd ever tested. Below is a 1600x1200 screen capture resized to a more web-friendly 800x600 size. It clearly shows the odd texture voids in the redeemer weapon. There should be no holes located at the end of those two pipes, but for some reason, they are always there on Geforce cards that I've tested.

Depth buffer issues

No Emboss Bump Map

With Emboss Bump Mapping

With the exception of the two issues I've mentioned, all other problems seemed to have been resolved with the UT engine. Color saturation is outstanding, lighting effects appear to be rendered accurately. Transparency and smoke effects seemed spot on as well. All things considered, UT has never looked better on the Geforce, something I'm pretty jazzed about being such a huge UT fan.

Kyodai and Links 2001

Below are two screen shots of Kyodai, a fantastic shareware tile game. The left shot is how the game appears on the Radeon, which does not seem to handle Emboss Bump Mapping, while the right shot is of the same game on the Leadtek, which renders Emboss Bump Mapping properly. The difference is pretty impressive and another nice touch I stumbled upon when testing the games that I normally play on the Ti 500.

While Kyodai may look a lot better thanks to the Emboss support, I found that Links 2001 suffered from some serious visual artifacts with the Leadtek card. I did not notice this type of problem with any other title, but it was downright annoying with the latest Links release, so much so that it makes it almost impossible to play. Since the game works flawlessly with the Radeon, I have to chalk this up to buggy Geforce drivers.