[5] The GPU wastes memory bandwidth and pixel fillrate due to unoptimized z-buffer usage, drawing of hidden surfaces, and a relatively inefficient RAM controller.

The main competition for GeForce 2 GTS, the Radeon DDR (R100), has hardware functions (called HyperZ) that address these issues.

[6] Because of the inefficient nature of the GeForce 2 GPUs, they could not approach their theoretical performance potential and the Radeon, even with its significantly less powerful 3D architecture, offered strong competition.

Architecturally identical to the GTS, the Ultra simply has higher core and memory clock rates.

Meant to be a niche product, it was rumored that GeForce 2 Ultra was intended to prevent 3dfx taking the lead with their Voodoo 5 6000 that was ending up never released as 3dfx went bankrupt.

Faster than the GTS and Pro but slower than the Ultra, the GeForce 2 Ti performed competitively against the Radeon 7500 (RV200), although the 7500 had the advantage of dual-display support.

Since the previous GeForce 256 line shipped without a budget variant, the RIVA TNT2 series was left to fill the "low-end" role—albeit with a comparably obsolete feature set.

[10] 3dfx's Voodoo4 4500 arrived too late, as well as being too expensive at US$150, but too slow to compete with Nvidia or ATI's offerings, and also lacking multi-monitor support.

Next up, the Radeon VE's RV100 GPU was cut down considerably from the R100 to reduce production costs, so it did not offer hardware T&L, an emerging 3D rendering feature of the day that was the major attraction of Direct3D 7.

Further, the Radeon VE featured only a single rendering pipeline, causing it to produce a substantially lower fillrate than the GeForce 2 MX.

With just 32 MB of SDR memory and an outdated architecture based on the Celsius design, it struggles to perform efficiently.

Its low GPU clock speed of 200 MHz and support for only DirectX 7.0 further hamper its ability to handle modern games and applications.