http://media.hardwareanalysis.com/articles/small/10144.gif" alt="CPU Scaling - Quake 3" border=0>

http://media.hardwareanalysis.com/articles/small/10145.gif" alt="CPU Scaling - MBTR" border=0>
We wanted to determine what kind of CPU horsepower was necessary to drive the Kyro II, and as the graphs both illustrate, the Kyro II scales well at low to moderate clockspeeds. It does, however, begin to taper off after about 1000 MHz, while the GeForce 2 line continues to scale well beyond that point.

What does that mean to you? Simply this -- if you're planning on purchasing a new CPU in excess of 1.2 GHz, you'll probably see much less of a performance delta between the two cards than we did in our testing. That is, beyond 1 GHz, the GeForce 2 will steadily increase in performance, while the Kyro II will begin to flatten out.

For a Duron or Pentium 3-equipped budget gaming system, for example, you can expect results similar to what we observed here. If you were to pair both cards with a 1.4 GHz Athlon, however, we suspect the GeForce 2 (especially the Pro) would begin to look much more attractive.