Availability: Soon

Not everyone can or wants to spend $300 for a top-of-the-line graphics card. Not everyone goes to extremes for a few extra fps. If you want excellent game performance but the urge isn't strong enough to burn a Texas sized hole in your pocket, NVIDIA has a new chip that might be just for you. It's called the GeForce2 MX, formerly known as NV11, and NVIDIA claims boards based on it will provide performance about equivalent to the GeForce 256 for only $119 to $179US, depending on added features. We managed to get ahold of a GeForce2 MX and put it through a round of benchmarking to bring you this guide.

Since the .18 micron design of the GeForce2 MX leverages much of the GeForce2 GTS technology, we are going to compare the two when giving you the specifications. From here on, we will refer to them as the MX and GTS for short. For clarity, the original GeForce 256 will be called the 256.

The MX is clocked at 175MHz, which is not too much less than the GTS at 200MHz. The MX has a second generation hardware transformation and lighting (T&L) engine that can process 20 million polygons per second, five million less than the GTS. This difference is due to the 25MHz clock speed difference.