NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200 Roundup!

 
With each new video card's release, Quake 3 becomes less and less of a relevant benchmark at its default settings.  When we continually turn up the quality and enable 4X AA though, it's still able to slow most video cards currently available down to a crawl.

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

With 4X Anti-Aliasing enabled (again in "Performance" mode on the Radeons), the GeForce 4 Ti4200s continued to outpace the other cards by a very significant margin.  At 1280x1024, performance dipped below what we would consider playable levels, but at 1024x768 the timedemos sped along at smooth, very playable frame rates.  Once again, the faster memory on the 64MB cards from Gainward and MSI enabled them to take the lead.  Anisotropic Filtering test are up next.

More OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and 32-Tap Aniso Turning Up the Quality

Anisotropic filtering is a method for filtering textures that, unlike bi-linear or tri-linear filtering, works properly on non-uniform, or odd shaped areas.  This type of filtering requires much more processing power though, so in some instances the performance hit can be significant.  If you've been on top of the 3D video card scene for a while, you probably know that ATi and NVIDIA GPUs perform Anisotropic filtering very differently.  Also, what NVIDIA calls 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering (4X in their drivers) is not what ATi calls 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering (8X in their drivers).  Another thing to consider is that the Radeons can't do trilinear filtering when Anisotropic filtering is enabled. The differing methods and capabilities traditionally gave ATi a huge performance advantage over NVIDIA.  It seems that NVIDIA has been optimizing their drivers though, as ATi's performance advantage has, for the most part, been eaten away.  In fact, if we dropped Quake 3 down to bilinear filtering, the Ti4200s actually out ran the Radeons.

More Quake 3...