Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NVIDIA Unveils (And Tom's Reviews) The GeForce4

Posted by timothy on from the more-pixels-faster dept.

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."

2 of 386 comments (clear)

  1. Another article by SILIZIUMM · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There is another article at Anandtech too, it's quite a good read. Contains pictures, benchmarks, etc.

    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1583

  2. Everybody's missing the point! by epepke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The exciting thing about the GeForce 4 is not that it's faster or cheaper, it's that finally the programmability is at an appropriate level.

    Uh-huh. 15%. Yawn. Don' need that. I can play Deus Ex just fine. Well, guess what. Even if you think that games are the entire universe, some day you might just need an MRI and need someone to be able to look at it and find something that will keep you from dying. Medical imaging is one of the things that the GeForce 4 will be good enough to do. Scientific visualization, volumetric rendering, that sort of stuff.

    Why is this? About a decade ago, everything was basically SGI. These were big, expensive machines, suitable for vertical markets. It was possible to get the engineers to work with the microcode for the sales of a small number of units.

    Then various card companies came along (NVidea has a lot of ex-SGI engineers) and started making cards for the horizontal gaming market. They concentrated, of course, on satisfying the needs of their biggest customers/promoters, which were the gaming people. Many of these cards were customizable, but at a level of abstruseness that made it so that maybe three people in the world could really hack them up the wazoo.

    In the mean time, SGI suffered, because even people who should know better make decisions on the basis of "gee whiz." No magazine is going to benchmark a card on how accurately it shows a tumor from real data. A perception rose that the graphics problem had been solved for cheap, when it really hadn't been.

    The GeForce 4 finally brings little-card graphics up to the point where mere mortals can actually do customization for vertical markets.