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With all of the hype
surrounding the Radeon 9700 Pro, NV30 and Parhelia
recently,
you'd think those were the only video cards people were
buying, but you'd be wrong. The fact of the matter
is, these high-end products are consumed by only 3-5% of
the total market. The vast majority of consumers
purchase video cards that have sub-$200 price tags, and
there are a ton of viable products available that fall
well within this price range. How do you know which
card is the right one for you though? With multiple
flavors of GeForce 3, GeForce 4 and Radeon based products,
among others, choosing one that suits your performance
needs and budget can be very difficult. Well, we're
hoping to shed a little light on the situation with
today's GeForce 4 Ti4200 Shoot-Out.
We've rounded up GeForce 4
Ti4200s from five different manufacturers, in varying
configurations, and compared their performance to a Radeon
8500 LE, Radeon 9000 Pro and a GeForce 4 MX440.
Three 64MB cards from
Gainward,
Best
Data
and
MSI, and three 128MB cards from
VisionTek,
MSI and
X-Micro
are all represented. We installed these cards into
one of our Pentium 4 test beds and set out to find which
one was most deserving of your hard earned dollars...
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Specifications and Features of the GeForce 4
Ti4200 |
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Power Without the
Premium. |
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Overview:
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Controller: NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
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Bus
Type AGP
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Memory
64MB or 128MB DDR
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Core
Clock 250MHz
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Memory
Clock 500MHz DDR memory (64MB)
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Memory
Clock 450MHz DDR memory (128MB)
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RAMDAC
350MHz
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API
Support Direct-X, Open GL ICD for Windows
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Connectors VGA, DVI, TV In/Out
NVIDIA
nfiniteFX II Engine:
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Dual
programmable Vertex Shaders, fast Pixel Shaders
and 3D textures give developers the freedom to
program a virtually infinite number of custom
special effects never seen before and gives you
the power to play true-to-life characters in
hyper-realistic environments. At twice the
performance of GeForce3.
Lightspeed Memory Architecture II:
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With
128-bit DDR Lightspeed Memory Architecture II
provides nearly double the memory bandwidth of
GeForce3.
Accuview
Anialiasitng Engine:
TV Out
Jack:
Requirements:
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266
MHz or higher CPU (AMD K6-2 or Intel Pentium II or
higher)
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AGP
2.0 Compliant Socket
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Windows 95 OSR2, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP
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64MB
of RAM
Features
at a Glance:
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AGP 4x
compatible with fast writes
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256-bit 3D and 2D graphics accelerator
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NVIDIA
nView display technologies
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Lightspeed Memory Architecture II
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Accuview Antialiasing
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High
Definition Video Processing Engine
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TV Out
connectors
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DVI
connector
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Installation, Drivers and Image Quality |
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Easy as Pie. |
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Thankfully, we did not have
any difficulty installing these cards into our test
system. All of these Ti4200s ship with a derivative
of NVIDIA's standard reference drivers, so their installations are
quite similar. We installed the cards into our AGP slot,
booted into a clean installation of Windows XP and
pointed to the driver CDs when prompted. One re-boot
later and we were up and running. If you're not familiar
with NVIDIA's Detonator XP series of drivers,
check out this page. We've covered these drivers
before, so we won't go in-depth here.
SCREEN SHOTS FROM
"AMERICA'S ARMY"
1024x768x32 with 4XS FSAA
Image quality with the GeForce
4 Ti4200s, whether gaming, watching DVDs or working in 2D
was very good. We cranked our desktop resolution all
the way to 1600x1200x32 using a Mitsubishi Diamond Scan
2040u and had uniform coloring and crisp text throughout.
Some would say NVIDIA's output is not quite up to par with
Matrox or ATi, but even in side by side comparisons, you'd
be hard pressed to see any significant differences.
As far as this reviewer is concerned, Matrox still wears
the 2D quality crown, and ATi has the best DVD playback,
but in 3D gaming, it's a tough call. I'd give the
nod to NVIDIA by a slim margin though, due to their very
nice Anisotropic filtering (in OpenGL) and virtually
glitch free drivers that hardly ever produce any strange
visual anomalies. The screen shots posted above were
taken from the first four training missions in
"America's Army". This game is based on the
UT:2003 engine, and as you can see, produces some very
nice visuals. I was especially impressed by the
detail in the trees in the second shot.
The
Cards...
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