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Pity those who, five months ago, shelled out for a Geforce3 TI500. Having faced tougher than expected competition from ATI's Radeon 8500, it's already yesterday's chip.
With almost indecent haste, Nvidia has a new flagship product, and one that's destined to stop ATI crowing. The Geforce4 TI4600 is, without any doubt, the most ludicrously, unbelievably speedy Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in all creation.
Here we review the TI chip on an Nvidia reference card and the MX GPU on an MSI product.
Geforce4 TI4600
In fact, if big numbers are all that matter you can save yourself some time right now and prepare to extend your overdraft. Our Geforce4 reference board produced staggering results on our test system. At any resolution, with or without Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA, where jagged edges in games are smoothed, making scenes look more realistic) the Geforce4 TI4600 whips any other card going.
In fact, if you want 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x FSAA switched on, it's the only board that can handle the job. That's just one benefit of having a whacking 128MB of DDR memory onboard.
Some of this performance increase can be put down to clock and memory speed increases, with the former now set at 300MHz and the memory clocked at 325MHz. Because it's DDR memory, this effectively runs at 650MHz.
However, the Geforce architecture hasn't been left untouched. First, the NfiniteFX 3D engine has been overhauled, with a new dual Vertex Shader pipeline, and an enhanced Pixel Shader, resulting in a theoretical three times increase in Geometry performance and a 50 per cent speed increase in Pixel Shader operations. In most current 3D applications you won't see quite that much difference, but in future applications that make heavy use of Pixel and Vertex Shaders, you should see NfiniteFX II pulling the TI4600 even further away from the competition.
Meanwhile, an improved version of the Geforce3's Lightning Memory Architecture means that bandwidth between the 300MHz GPU and the 650MHz DDR memory chips reaches a staggering 10.4Gbytes/sec - a significant move up from the TI500's 8Gbytes/sec.
Not only is the pipeline fatter, but it's also running more efficiently, thanks to improved Z-Culling techniques (where the card doesn't bother drawing what you can't see) and a system of independent caches managing flow of the 3D data.
All of this isn't too exciting if it just means a jump from 70fps (frames per second) to 100fps when Unreal 2 is launched, but Nvidia is stressing that the sheer amount of power on offer makes previously unavailable effects - realistic fur, for example - very possible. Whether furry varmints actually start making an appearance on our desktops next year is, of course, a matter for developers of 3D games.
There is one improvement that will make a tangible difference now: Accuview Anti-Aliasing. Previously, if you turned anti-aliasing on at high resolutions, your game slowed to a crawl. With the TI4600, you still suffer a performance hit when switching FSAA on - Quake III Team Arena drops 30fps at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x FSAA - but it's a manageable one, and pushing it up to 4x FSAA still keeps you within playable levels.
In fact, you can run Return to Castle Wolfenstein at 1,600 x 1,200 with 4x FSAA switched on and still play at 50fps. And yes, it looks gorgeous!
We were unable to test the new, high-quality 4sx mode, which promises to sharpen the image further with finer colour graduations combined with high-detail anisotropic filtering, but the final drivers should make that possible.
Dual-monitor technology is also improved - Nvidia is now finally up to Matrox's high standards in this department. The desktop manager is now smart enough to pop up dialogue boxes where it's told, rather than in the centre of the two monitors.
Our preview card arrived with three connectors on it: the standard D-Sub, an S-Video TV-out, and a digital DVI connector.
So, is it one to rush out and buy? Well, if you're putting together the ultimate games machine, then yes. Otherwise, be patient. Even a year after the release of the Geforce3 there are very few titles that really demand that level of performance, while Pixel and Vertex Shaders still have yet to make any serious impact on games.
All this good stuff is coming, but at the moment you'll be paying around £350 to watch some spectacular demos run.
Geforce4 MX440
The TI series is being used by Nvidia to show off what the company can do, but you're more likely to buy the MX series.
Nvidia's budget chips have been poor for some time - rival products based on PowerVR's Kyro II and ATI's 7500 chips have sat in our Best Buys section for the past few months.
With the Geforce4 MXs, however, Nvidia is well and truly back on the budget map. Nvidia says that the MX isn't just a cut down version of the TI - it's been designed from the ground up to be a decent performer at a decent price.
That said, it shares a lot of features with its more expensive big brother. For example, the chip supports Nview, Nvidia's new dual-monitor technology described above. To date, we've yet to see a dual-head Geforce4 MX, but they will come, plus cards with DVI connectors.
It also shares Nvidia's new Video Processing Engine, which claims to offer improved DVD playback and video scaling, plus enhanced support for HDTV (high-definition television) and Progressive Scan output modes. Unfortunately we didn't get time to investigate whether the MX can meet ATI's high standards in this department, but we will come back to it another time.
The main feature missing from the MX is Nvidia's NfiniteFX II engine, so there's no Pixel Shader. When coded into games, Pixel Shaders make more realistic effects such as skin possible. These games also include lower, fall-back levels of detail for cards without pixel shading ability, so you'll still be able to play them with the MX.
The other major difference is that all MXs have dual-memory controllers, whereas TIs have four. This explains why the MX460 is clocked faster than the TI4400 in our table (see original article, PCW April 2002) yet should still be slower.
Two older, but in some ways more important, technologies that it does support are Transform and Lighting (T&L) and environment bump mapping.
With the right games support, the former takes some of the load off the processor, speeding things up; the latter makes rough surfaces look more realistic. Because the technologies have been around for a while, there's more gaming support: a compelling reason to upgrade if your existing 3D card doesn't support these features.
MSI is the first manufacturer to let us look at a finished MX440. Its G4 MX440-T has 64MB of DDR memory, along with D-Sub and S-Video outputs.
The MSI comprehensively thrashed ATI's Radeon 7500 in our benchtests. The scores also show that it is possible to turn on 2x FSAA at 1,280 x 1,024 in DirectX-compatible games: an impressive feat for a £105 graphics card. This is easily the card's best selling point.
Considering the card's low price, MSI's software package is very generous. An MSI-branded version of WinDVD is the most useful, but there's also a collection of games to show off your new card.
So impressed are we with MSI's new card, that it becomes our graphics card of choice in this month's best buys.
DETAILS
Nvidia Geforce4 TI4600 (Reference Board)
Price: Approximately £350 (£297.87 ex VAT)
Contact: Nvidia, www.nvidia.com
Pros: Incredibly fast with an excellent range of feature enhancements
Cons: Final boards will be predictably expensive
MSI G4 MX440-T
Price: £105.75 (£90 ex VAT)
Contact: Scan 0870 755 4747, www.msi.com.tw
Pros: Faster than its budget competition; impressive feature list
Cons: Some might want to wait for dual-head cards to become available
See also:
The All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500DV covers all multimedia bases from TV to sound. 15 Mar 2002
This amazing graphics chip continues to set new standards. 14 Feb 2002
The most ludicrously, unbelievably speedy graphics processing unit in all creation. 07 Feb 2002All Graphics Cards
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