NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti and GeForce4 MX Debut!

nVIDIA's New GeForce4 Ti and GeForce4 MX
The NV25 and NV17 Debut

By Dave Altavilla
2/6/02

  
Here are the details of our test bed on which we tested.  A clean install of WinXP was used for each installation of a new graphics card into the same common system hardware.

HotHardware's Test System Pentium 4 Northwood and the i845 w/ DDR

• Pentium 4 Northwood CPU - 2GHz

• Abit BD7-RAID - i845 DDR

• 256MB of Corsair PC2400 DDR SDRAM

• IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

• Sound Blaster Live Value

• Windows XP Professional

• Direct X 8.1 (standard with WinXP)

• Asus V8200T5 - GeForce3 Ti 500

• NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 Reference Card

• ATi Radeon 8500

• NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 128MB Reference Card

• NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 64MB Reference Card

• NVIDIA Detonator 4 reference drivers version 27.30

• ATi Radeon 8500 Drivers 6.13.10.6025

• Intel chipset drivers version 3.20

New Detonator 4 Reference Driver 27.30 New features and control for the GeForce4

We didn't have time to really cover the nView feature set as much as we would have liked in this article.  If you refer back to page two here in our piece, you get a run down of nViews capabilities.  However, suffice it to say that it is easily the most powerful and versatile multi-monitor/dual independent display solution we have ever seen.  That's saying a lot as well since we've  seen the best, from the likes of Matrox etc.  Beyond that you see that the drivers have change only slightly with a few new additions like, the 4XS AA mode we showed you earlier and finally, NVIDIA gives the users control panel access to anisotropic filtering settings, will which allow you to sharpen textures, especially for AA settings like Quincunx that blur things somewhat.

Benchmarks - Quake 3 Arena Timedemo No AA set, just flat out performance

We'll hold off on the AA scores right now and just let you see how things stack up when the cards are going flat out.  We'll start with Q3 here because it really isn't much of a strain for any modern GPU.  However, we'll finish things up though with some tough DX8 and leading OpenGL engine benchmarking.

As you can see, even the spartan GeForce 4 MX 460 pulls over 80 fps at 1600X1200 in Quake 3.  I say spartan in jest because card clearly is capable of very nice frame rates in high res Quake 3, for a card that is going to retail for under $150!  We tested all cards at the maximum geometry and textures settings with 32 bit color and trilinear filtering.  However, remember this is an "old" game engine by today's standards and there is not use of pixel or vertex shaders in Quake 3.  Also, will you take a look at the GeForce4 Ti 4600 scores?  One word... OUCH!  That's what we call an old fashion whoopin'!   Let's enable AA...

Here the GeForce4 MX 460 shows serious strength besting the Radeon 8500 and even the GeForce3 Ti 500, when it comes to AA performance.  These tests were taken at 1280X1024, which is no small feat when 4X AA is enabled.  Of course the GeForce4 Ti 4600 absolutely man-handles the rest of the pack and in 4X mode, shows perfectly "playable" frame rates.  One last thing to note is that NVIDIA promised the same performance in Quincunx mode AA as in 2X mode, for their GeForce4 product line.  It was uncanny to see that the tests were dead-nuts right on with that statement.

Let's see what the picture looks like in a DirectX 8 benchmark.

3DMark 2001 Benchmarks