NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX440 Roundup!

NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX 440 Round-up
Abit, Chaintech, eVGA, Gainward, Leadtek,
 Visiontek and X-Micro Do Battle!

By - Marco Chiappetta
April 25, 2002

In these tests, before running the timedemos, we set Quake 3 Arena to the "High Quality" graphics setting, then maxed out the texture quality and geometry sliders and enabled trilinear filtering.

OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 Arena Benching with the Oldies!

Considering that most of the cards in this round-up can be found for less than $95, it is exciting to see these kind of performance levels.  With all of the graphical options maxed out, framerates approaching 150 FPS at this resolution are very respectable.

Upping the resolution to 1280x1024 caused a hefty hit in framerate, but Quake 3 remained completely playable at this resolution, just missing the 100 FPS mark.  

Cranking things up a notch further, again results in a major performance drop, but still stays above the "magic" 60 FPS mark.  The GeForce 4 MX hasn't exactly been the darling of the media, but gaming at these performance levels for such a relatively small investment is great.

More OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and 2X AA More GL Tests

 
Without any image enhancing techniques enabled, the GeForce 4 MX 440 seems perfectly capable of tearing through Quake 3 without a problem.  What's going to happen if we up the ante and enable AA though...

With 2X AA enabled all of the card were capable of running Quake 3 at acceptable levels, but there was a significant hit in performance, upwards of 40%. 

The trend continued as we upped the resolution to 1280x1024.  Without any antialiasing, all of our GeForce 4 MX 440s just barely missed hitting 100 FPS, with 2X AA enabled, however, they weren't able to break 52 FPS.  

We continued our torture of the GeForce 4 MX 440s, and enabled 2X AA at 1600X1200.  Things did not bode well for any of the cards here.  If you plan on gaming at high resolutions with a GeForce 4 MX 440, it'll be without antialiasing enabled.  4X AA is up next...

Even OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and 4X AA Pouring it on!

Enabling 4X AA really brought the GeForce 4 MX 440s in our round-up to their knees.  To maintain smooth, playable framerates at high resolutions with antialiasing enabled, a video card needs an abundance of two things:  1) Memory Bandwidth and 2) Fillrate.  Unfortunately, with only two pixel pipelines in the core clocked at 270MHz. and memory clocked at a mere 200MHz. (400MHz. DDR), it looks like 4X AA may be a bit out of reach in most games. 

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