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VisionTek is a relative newcomer to the European market and the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600, a top-of-the-range graphics board for the performance hungry, is one of its first releases in the UK.
Like the Asus V8460, it uses the same combination of a GeForce4 Ti 4600 chipset with a core speed of 300MHz and 128Mb of DDR Ram clocked at 325MHz, equivalent to 650MHz.
It's a powerful combination, offering a maximum fill rate of 1.2 megapixel/s along with a memory bandwidth of 10.4Gbps. Unlike the GeForce4 MX series, the GeForce4 Ti chipset fitted to this board extends the capabilities of the previous GeForce3 range, as well as introducing some new features.
The biggest advance is the addition of a second vertex engine, like the graphics core used in Microsoft's Xbox, allowing the Xtasy GeForce 4 Ti 4600 to process a massive 4.8Megatexel/s with full DirectX 8.0a support for custom shaders as they appear.
Multi-sampled anti-aliasing (Accuview) is among the new features and the 128Mb frame buffer allows nVidia's five-point anti-aliasing to be applied to resolutions up to 1,600 by 1,200 pixels. A new DirectX-only anti-aliasing function, called 4XS, is also featured.
The board closely follows nVidia's own bulky reference design, with the heat sink and fan designed to channel air over the surface of the Ram chips.
The same is also true of performance, with the VisionTek board returning an almost identical 3D WinMark 2000 score of 276. However, in addition to the DVI-I and VGA outputs at the rear, an S-Video port allows for TV output and input for video.
That aside, the feature set of these two GeForce4 Ti-based boards is the same, including the quad memory controllers, MPEG-2 decoding and motion compensation.
As a result, the Ti 4600's 3D performance is remarkable, offering significant speed improvements for existing software. In addition, a custom shader platform is available for developers wanting to create their own effects.
If you have this amount of money to spend on a graphics card, then the VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 won't disappoint you.
Price: £315.99 (ex VAT)
Specifications:
- Controller: mVidia GeForce Ti 4600
- Memory: 128Mb DDR SDRam
- Core clock: 300MHz
- Memory clock: 650MHz
- RAMDAC: 350MHz
- Connectors: VGA,DVI-I S-Video
Contact: VisionTek 020 8323 8040
www.visiontek.com
See also:
A Herculean graphics card for gaming and video editing. 24 Jul 2002
A mainstream graphics card using nVidia's GeForce4 MX440 chipset. 29 May 2002
The most ludicrously, unbelievably speedy graphics processing unit in all creation. 07 Feb 2002All Graphics Cards
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