NVIDIA Unveils (And Tom's Reviews) The GeForce4

EconolineCrush writes: "NVIDIA has finally revealed its GeForce4 Titanium and MX graphics processors. Tom's Hardware has a some benchmarks comparing the new offerings to current products, and the results are pretty interesting. Meanwhile, The Tech Report does an excellent job cutting through the hype with an examination of each new chip's features. Both articles are well worth reading to get the full story on the latest from NVIDIA."

Comments

Tom's is going downhill.

[joshsisk]

After this article and yesterday's overly-glowing review of the Xbox, it seems to me that Tom's has fallen on hard times. Consider the following sentence:

"The test guys who aught [sic] to have caught this driver bug seem to be busy selling their stock our [sic] counting their money instead."

All their articles now seem to have been written in five minutes and sent though to door without the slightest bit of editing- or even spell checking!

I don't mean to nitpick, but Tom's used to be a very reliable source- and a great read. Not so much anymore.

What's the point?

[filtersweep]

Does anyone use these cards for anything other than games?

These cards cost as much as a decent CPU... or a console game system- yet are the fraction the cost of a CAD card. Their shelf life seems pretty limited as well. In a year or two they will all have a half gig of Rambus or DDR and we'll have 16X AGP? Then we'll all need high definition monitors because today's pixels will all look "blocky" by comparison. Then we'll be right back to unusable framerates at higher resolutions... it all goes full circle.

I've never been able to justify the cost, but then again I don't game. The ironic thing is that "fun and games" arguably stress the hardware more than any other apps for most general home users.

A new watershed in (c/g)pu history

[yoink!]

The THG article indicates that for all intents and purposes, the average home-computer user still has enough power in his 700-1000MHz machine that upgrading to the rediculously overpowered 2GHz P4s and Athlon XP 2000+ etc, just isn't worth it for them (unless of course their livelihood is dependant upon computing time). I believe the same is starting to happen in the GPU field as well. A brother of mine recently bought a GeForce 3 card, just after the introduction of the whole Ti 500/200 updates. To this day it's still more power than he needs and should be able to outlast the TNT2 Ultra card he replaced it with. The main point being that except for those people that crave "the fastest," and there's nothing wrong with that ;-) , these incremental increases in performance are going to mean less and less to the consumer, most of whom go to the biggest electronics store around and say "my kid needs a special 3d thingy to play this new game." Although I honestly believe people would be happier if they informed themselves a little, it's impossible to think that they will and in the end it doesn't matter. We've been years away from any new device that shows real promise, instead the best some people can come up with is an integrated cell-phone / PDA. Hmmm... who would have thought... until something does show up... I'll be playing Quake on an 8MB single-head graphics card. Humiliation!

Re:Can't stand it

[Geek In Training]

"I hope if I buy a GeForce4, it'll last, in both speed and 3D technology. "

Hey buddy, cope. If you're not realizing by now that you're going to be able to run the latest and greatest games with all the eye candy without shelling out $200-$400 every 12 months, that's YOUR problem, not the industry's.

This is like my neighbors who were mad at *ME* for telling them they could not load WindowsXP on their 486 DX2/66. But we paid $4000 for this machine ten years ago! That was almost half the cost of a car! And it still works! They ended up going to WalMart and buying an HP, with monitor and CD burner, for $699. Now they quit whining... until 5 years from now then it won't run Microsoft AOL version 15.2.

As for me, I have too many other interests to shell out $400 for a video card. I buy games 18-24 months after they come out, at the $19.95 (or lower) price. I *NEVER* pay more than $130 for a video card, and I'm extremely pleased with my price/performance return. Go look at newegg.com for the GeForce2 GTS-V for $49 and you'll see what card I'm running; it gives me 70 frames per second at high quality in Quake3.

If that isn't enough for you, well, I'm sorry, you're just going to have to pay more for the Cadillac.

Re:What else is there?

[Odinson]

Seriously, are there any competitive alternatives to NVidia these days?

Strangly few slashdoters want to talk about this.

Personally, I'm starting to think about replacing my TNT2, but I'd kind of like to get something with open source linux drivers. At the same time, I don't want to have to go back to a Voodoo 5 or some shit like that just because it is open.

I totally agree. Not only would I buy such a card myself but I would advertise it to everybody I know as the best(most flexable) solution.

So, does any company make good graphics cards with open specs?

The Raedon 7500 (AIW as well?) is the best non-nvidia card in xfree (4.2) right now.

The Xfree guys are working on the 8500, but who knows.

The problem is a one-two punch

Nobody bothers to try with Linux since good free closed source drivers are made availible.

Nvidia bought one the players and shrunk it two a two way race.

I would care less if Nvidia had bought 3dfx or released their own closed drivers, but both.....