GeForce4 Ti 4200 Preview

Mike Chambers writes "Hi All, I've completed a preview of NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4200 graphics chipset. Although the preview contains your typical benchmarks, it's centered around game play and antialiasing image quality. Here's a list of the games involved - Quake 3 & Team Arena, IL-2 Sturmovik, Nascar Racing 2002 Demo, Jedi Knight 2, Serious Sam 2, Max Payne Demo, Comanche 4 Demo, Dungeon Siege and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2002 Demo. Since antialiasing image quality, especially Quincunx and 4XS, was an important aspect of the preview, all of the screen shots were saved in high quality PNG format. For those Slashdot readers that are avid gamers, you might want to check this out."

Comments

Review

[hs81]

Nice quality graphics.

Good stuff

[MoiTominator]

Good review. Detailed and uses several pretty new games to benchmark, instead of relying on the old Q3 tests.

Re:Good stuff

[jayant_techguy]

Absolutely.

But the main question is that, with software not being able to cope up with the pace hardware industry is going on, is nVIDIA GeForce 4 worth it??

Know your 'Geek Quotient' ?

first post

[foobar42]

almost i guess

Hello, SPOILER warning?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking forward to uncovering these features of the GeForce4 Ti 4200 myself. Now you've spoiled everything.

Re:Hello, SPOILER warning?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry?

Which part of this link --> " preview of NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4200 graphics chipset." did you misinterpret?

First!

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstys, ::thrust::

the need for ... high fps?

[CmdrTaco (editor)]

This is slightly off topic, but I think it is at least somewhat appropriate. Gas Powered Games new release, Dungeon Siege, is one of the most beautiful 3D games I've ever seen, but reading on forums about it I realized that even a Geforce3 with a killer Athlon XP system would still only let the game run around 20-30 fps. People have been complaining like mad about this, because the very reason the spend so much money on the best possible systems is so they can get a high fps. But, somebody on one of the forums said that since the entire game is rendered in 3D, the FPS is quite irrelvent (the frame does not actually refresh, but each element on the screen moves at its own pace). So, taking this information as fact, does this mean that the only games that the GF4 would be worthwile for would be UT2002 and such games?

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[strictnein]

But, somebody on one of the forums said that since the entire game is rendered in 3D, the FPS is quite irrelvent (the frame does not actually refresh, but each element on the screen moves at its own pace)

This is quite correct. The game is extremely playable with a "lowly" 1.2 GHz Athlon with a Geforce 2 Ultra. I usually play it at either 1024x768 or 1152x864 resolution.

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[MisterBlister]

People have been complaining about this because they are idiots. Dungeon Siege runs about 20-30 FPS on high end systems but it also runs about 20-30 FPS on lower end systems because it scales to the system's specs... It just doesn't look as nice on the lower end systems because it cuts out some special effects and other features.

20-30 FPS is more than enough for a game like Dungeon Siege where little to no fast-action decision making or aiming is going on...Unfortunately these whiners are the same sort of FPS-(frames per second)whores that think you need 300 FPS in Quake (do their monitors refresh 300 times per second? Don't think so...yes I realize you want a high peak FPS so the low-end FPS is still pretty high, but even given that 250+ average FPS is just overkill for any game).

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[MiTEG]

The game is also extremely playable with my "lowly" PIII-800 with a Voodoo3 at 1024x768 and I rarely face FPS slowdowns.

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[Stormie]

Dungeon Siege, is one of the most beautiful 3D games I've ever seen, but reading on forums about it I realized that even a Geforce3 with a killer Athlon XP system would still only let the game run around 20-30 fps.

Well, I've only played the demo, but it's solid at 60fps on my Athlon XP 1600+ w/ GeForce2Ti. So unless something's horribly broken in the full version of the game, I'd call bullshit on those claims.

This is at 800x600x32bit with all the optional features (shadows etc.) turned on. It looks just fine.

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[Sabriel]

Dungeon Siege, is one of the most beautiful 3D games I've ever seen, but reading on forums about it I realized that even a Geforce3 with a killer Athlon XP system would still only let the game run around 20-30 fps.

Well, I've only played the demo, but it's solid at 60fps on my Athlon XP 1600+ w/ GeForce2Ti. So unless something's horribly broken in the full version of the game, I'd call bullshit on those claims.

From the readme doc accompanying the demo:

Reduced Visual and Audio Quality
In order to compress Dungeon Siege to a reasonable demonstration size, many textures and sounds have been heavily degraded from the retail version. The differences are most noticeable on high-end systems that have premium sound and graphics. Please note that the retail version of Dungeon Siege may look and sound much better, depending on your system.

The above may help explain your super-high-fps experience with the demo. But heck, the demo looks fabulous even with the heavily degraded features, doesn't it. :)

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[Judecca]

But, somebody on one of the forums said that since the entire game is rendered in 3D, the FPS is quite irrelvent (the frame does not actually refresh, but each element on the screen moves at its own pace)

In time every element moves at is own pace, but the framerate is when those elements are updated on the screen. The rendering of this game is no different than that of UT2003, or any 3d FPS. They all use time based systems, so they don't run slower on old machines, only with a lower framerate.

Ever single update the entire screen is redrawn from scratch. Seems pretty insane, but thats how its done. The rasterization process takes a ton of triangles and turns them into 2D for your flat screen hundreds of times in a second. The reason for this is every time the 3d coordinates change, they will change the shape of the 2D scene you're seeing on your flat monitor.

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[bm_luethke]

I play dungeon seige on my laptop, a 1.13 ghz piii and a 32 meg gforce2 go. The in-game FPS counter usually stays between 8-20 depending on the amount of mobs on the screen at a time. Even on a LCD panel at 10 FPS it does not look chopy. This is with all the textures/shadows/etc turned to the best quality. I tried reducing the shadows and some of the quality, while I got much higer framerates (15-30) the over all quality sucked - just as smooth looking as before and les detail. One time I have had some choppiness but while running from a large group of mobs I ran into another and must have had 30-40 mobs (plus eight of my own chars all casting/shooting/meleeing) moments before I died.

I, personaly could care less about frame rates as long as the game looks nice . I've seen quake run at 40 FPS vs ~70 and could not initially pick out which one was which. After showing me which one was running faster I *think* I could see some difference with high speed turns but it just as easily could have been psycho-somatic. Then I have seen some games run at high frame rates and suck. Though, of course, like most other people, I *like* that number to be as high as possible, I just dont get mad when its not and the game still looks nice :)

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article:

In the majority of cases, I would estimate that frame rates averaged around 30 frames per second until a major battle took place where the frame rate would dip into the upper teens and low twenties. Even when I used the GeForce4 Ti 4600, performance wasn't noticeably better.

Yes, I can definitely see how my post was modded as off-topic. This is the very issue I was speaking of, and it's IN THE ARTICLE. But, I suppose it's too much to ask that people moderate AND read the articles. After all, they're not getting paid anything.

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[vipw]

How can racism be compared with discriminating on the choices of an individual. People should be held responsible for things they choose or can change (religion, nickname, etc), but it is absolutely ludicrous to hold someone responsible for their race, which they have no control over. Comparing the two things doesn't make any sense at all.

Re:the need for ... high fps?

[Stormie]

From the readme doc accompanying the demo:

Reduced Visual and Audio Quality In order to compress Dungeon Siege to a reasonable demonstration size, many textures and sounds have been heavily degraded from the retail version.

Well root my boot. I totally missed that. Yep, true enough. Since just yesterday at work we were dealing with the consequences of texture-page-thrashing due to too-large textures, I can surely see how this would improve my fps..

But heck, the demo looks fabulous even with the heavily degraded features, doesn't it. :)

Looks nice. Unfortunately, after a solid afternoon playing it, I'm pretty much bored, and don't expect to be buying the game. Far, far too repetitive for me..

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never heard of your site before... but I'm reading the review now ;)

oblivious

[Anonymous Coward]

they are up to the geforce 4 now? where have i been *looks at old ati rage* oh well.

Hey

[Forsh]

Too bad the Linux "d00ds" will not enjoy as great a gaming experience with this bad boy as us "Windows" d00ds. I could never see Everquest, Camelot, or anything like it as open source. Would ruin the game totally.

Re:Hey

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, it would be -1 redundant of me to point out the SHEER UNMITIGATED HYPOCRISY of an open-source site promoting a card that can and will only work under AND PROPRIETARY SYSTEM

U R all VARY hypocritical. Plz Die.
Thnx!! :):)

Re:Hey

[magicslax]

Too bad the Linux "d00ds" will not enjoy as great a gaming experience with this bad boy as us "Windows" d00ds. I could never see Everquest, Camelot, or anything like it as open source. Would ruin the game totally.

It's called Nethack, duh - which is why us Linux "d00ds" need to buy geForce4s to make text mode games..even faster! er...../me mutters incoherently and runs to corner.

Re:Hey

[Forsh]

Damnit I will take you to hell.

Re:Hey

[awptic]

What the hell gives you the idea a game would need to be open source for it to run on linux? There's quite a few good games for linux: castle wolfenstein (which I own), quake3, all the ones that were ported by loki, and the upcoming neverwinter nights (which is sure to be a big hit), to name a few. Get a clue, it's this kind of thinking that discourages game developers from porting to linux in the first place.

Re:Hey

[Forsh]

Before I bring you to hell, let me tell you that Linus and his tribunal will never enjoy the same gaming experience as us "Windows" D00Dz, because he can not haXor the kerNal, so he would cry when I kill him. K.Thx.

Re:Hey

[Forsh]

Gamers don't want liNux haXors ruining their gaming experience. k. thx. Iwonder how hard it would be to cheat in Everquest if it was ported to liNux.

Re:HEY

[Hyperhaplo]

Hey! Welcome to the real world where quite a lot of Linux/BSD users have either two boxes or dual boot.
I have, for your information, two boxes: A 633 with Mandrake and FreeBSD on it, which does just about everything; and a 1.8G Intel box that runs windoze and basically runs games and needs to be reinstalled every 6 months (minimun).
This card I would throw in the Doze box, of course, for games, of course - Why bring linux into this? Anyway, in a while the linux drivers will be out :)

Re:HEY

[Anonymous Coward]

not really. you could probably get one on a moderate, affordable server, say,

dual p3 750, 512mb of pc 133 ram

and you could host a quake tourney of 4 on that one card. ive done it w/ my geforce2 mx (but with only two people playing). thats right 800x600, 32-bit textures quake3, one on my monitor, one exported w/ glx precomputed to a crappy old computer with a matrox card. ah, the beauty that is X.

besides being a troll, you are an insolent fuck. :)

cheers,

-brady

Re:HEY

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for free speach when you're paid in free beer.

As long as people dual boot, there will be no need to develop for Linux.

When .NET takes off (and runs better under M$) then *n?x will be even more marginalized, until it rates below OS/2 in mindshare.

Oh, but hey, we've got shiny new cards...we only had to sell our souls, but we got the cards. ::rolleyes::

U R all VARY short-syted -n- hipocritical.Plz die.
Thnx!! :):)

Re:HEY

[Judecca]

Fully realized under windows only? Check out:

http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=linux

They just added Geforce 4 support and OpenGL 1.3 extensions.

NVIDIA has their own linux driver team, and the drivers perform on par with Windows machines. The only think lacking is Direct3D support, which is useless under linux anyway.

Re:HEY

[Hyperhaplo]

As long as people dual boot, there will be no need to develop for Linux.

I'll continue to dual boot until I can live without a windoze box for good. It's very close at the moment, if you don't realise. The only thing windows is really good for is games. See above comments about this.

When .NET takes off

If .NET takes off

I conceed your point about souls :( If you have an alternative, please speak up

Re:Hey

[Peyna]

Linux users didn't have to spend $200 on their OS, so they've got $200 more to spend on games than everyone else. Heh.. Just a thought.

Re:Hey

[j09824]

Huh? Drivers for Linux are already out, and they work well. There are also plenty of games for these cards that work on Linux, as well as many engineering and scientific applications.

More GeForce4 reviews

[bleeeeck]

AnandTech had a good sub $200 video card review that includes the GeForce4 Ti 4200 (it also covers ATI's 128MB Radeon 8500LE).

Re:More GeForce4 reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

AnandTech had a good sub $200 video card review

Yeah, that's been the newest article since last week.. what's up with them lately?

If this gets /.ed...

[Omerna]

I'd just like to let everyone know that the screenshots are GORGEOUS, and while I'm going to be and don't have time to read everything skimming the pictures was a review in and of itself.

I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[HaggiZ]

Time and time again these fantastic new sound/graphics/whatever cards are released, and almost always targetted towards gamers. Is it just me? Am I the only one happy with the quality I get out of my current card and the games available for it? The graphics are done well in most games to offer a fantastic and believable escape into the games. And in the end it all comes down the the gameplay anyways.

That being said, I'm not against the new developments. It certainly does look like an awesome card, just seems to me that this particular market segment could almost be bled dry and these cards may have to find something else they are useful for to continue to survive. I dont have a deep enough understanding of the market or those in it to be able to make a serious call on it though.

I remember reading a long long time ago about developments that were looking at moving cycles across to other processors (i.e., big nasty graphics cards) that could be used to offset workloads when they weren't being fully utilised (99% of the time you aren't game playing). Anybody know what happened?

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[MisterBlister]

Time and time again these fantastic new sound/graphics/whatever cards are released, and almost always targetted towards gamers. Is it just me? Am I the only one happy with the quality I get out of my current card and the games available for it?

Well, there's no reason to get a GeForce 4 now unless you're a software developer or really need those extra 5 FPS in Quake3 (305 FPS instead of 300 FPS)... GF4 (and GF3) do offer significant advantages over older cards, but since the development cycle for high-quality games is about 3-4 years, compared to the development cycle of new graphics cards (6 months - 1 year), the game engines are always lagging behind. Nothing out yet even really takes advantage of what the GeForce 3 has to offer -- until Doom3 is released, anyway.

The best thing to do is just ignore these new card releases, and let other fools buy them just to be 'l33t'. In a year or more when you can actually buy games that will use GF4 features, the cards will be much cheaper than they are now...

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[CySurflex]

While I certainly do agree with you that the rate of developments in this field is dizzying (for the pocket as well) there is definitely something to be said for HOW FUCKING AWESOME all the new games are.

It may even feel a bit like a conspiracy between the game developers and the 3D card makers. You may even think that the differences between last year's games this year's are real subtle. Just compare Quake I, Quake II, Quake III and maybe Soldier of Fortune 2 (released a day or two ago) to get a better appreciation of how far we've come.

CySurflex
(Unhappy with my old 16MB card)

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[mojo-raisin]

I'm suffering mightily with a PII-400 and Matrox G200 - holding out until I know I'll have a system good enough for Doom3.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[brokenbeaker]

If you've read the article, you notice that all the benchmarks are run with antialiasing. So in fact, these cards do breathe a new life into old games - the author remarks that he would never go back to running games without antialiasing turned on. The performance of these cards is high enough to get get good framerates with antialiasing.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[Moonshadow]

I hear you. My outlook on most new hardware is that its immediate usefulness is in driving down the prices of the currently average hardware. At the time, I'm still running on a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000, and it can handle most games just fine. Some of the newer ones cause it to choke at times (Jedi Outcast, Yavin) but it has served me quite faithfully.

That said, I'm upgrading to a low-end GeForce4 tomorrow. The Voodoo just doesn't cut it for more heavy-duty stuff, and it has no native MPEG decompression abilities, rendering DVDs a bit choppy at times. Also, it has no TV out - a feature "standardized" in cards just recently, and IMO, a necessary feature when used in conjunction with a DVD drive. Hence, an upgrade. There will always be people who have a) the money, and b) the desire to have the "latest and greatest", and they are the ones who fuel these new products, although at $200 it's not a bad price. I'm sure that companies take the fact that second and third generation hardware sells better...but it's not second or third generation if there isn't new hardware to succeed it.

Pfeh...I need sleep.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[CySurflex]

Any word on what kind of system that is going to be? I'm with a pretty similar set-up - PII-450 with a Matrox 400-TV. Whatever card I get will have the TV/Video IN+OUT just like the 400-TV - and I'm trying to decide between just upgrading the card to getting a new system.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[sh4de]

I remember reading a long long time ago about developments that were looking at moving cycles across to other processors (i.e., big nasty graphics cards) that could be used to offset workloads when they weren't being fully utilised (99% of the time you aren't game playing). Anybody know what happened?

This rings a bell. The phenomenon is nothing new (note the date below!) and known as Wheel of Reincarnation. Quoting the Jargon File 4.3.1:

wheel of reincarnation
[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland "On the Design of Display Processors", Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[Ed Avis]

#In. order [that readers# without one# of these wonderful| new cards; can experience#some of the improved #display quality/, (I have antialiased {this Slashdot#post.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[daniel2000]

My opinion is that we are at a kind of plateu where improvements aren't making that much of an effect for end users.

However I hope progress isn't slowed as the holy grail is to achieve real photo quality in real time and that would be an awsome sight.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[Wordplay]

That's just not true. Anti-aliasing, in particular, depends entirely on the card's performance. I have a GF3 Ti200 and I have a GF4 Ti4600. In any given resolution, I get the pretty much the same frame rates on the latter with anti-aliasing on as I do for the former with anti-aliasing off. The apparent difference in visual quality is significant; texture crawl and edge jags pretty much disappear.

Sure, I'll be glad when games specifically target my card, but for now, I'm enjoying some particularly clean looking software. It's worth the extra money to me, and it has nothing to do with being l33t.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[ergo98]

Well, there's no reason to get a GeForce 4 now unless you're a software developer or really need those extra 5 FPS in Quake3 (305 FPS instead of 300 FPS)

The words of a true non-gamer willing to expound their wisdom for all to see. I play the game Urban Terror (urbanterror.net), which is a Quake 3 mod, on a medium end system including a GeForce 3 Ti200 : I have to turn a significant number of features down to run smoothly at 1024x768 32-bit, and even still certain parts of certain maps slow to a relative crawl (crawl being 20fps or so : It feels sloggy and throws your timing off, not to mention that it ruins any immersion). Don't even get me started on AA, because in real applications (i.e. not a stock Quake 3 which virtually no one plays anymore) that is a frame rate super killer.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[weinford]

I am an EverQuest addict. EverQuest is a subscription based MMORP-game which "updates" itself every time you start it, so all users can connect to the same server, no version conflicts, great. Late last year they updated the game engine to be full-featured DirectX8 woohoo. Well, before the graphics sucked because they were totally outdated, even Moorhuhn looked better. But now my GeForce 2 MX can hardly handle the data, and half a gig of RAM is just enough for the game not to crash.

My point is:

There are 300.000 subscribers to EverQuest, and with Star Wars Galaxies out there will probably be even more addicted folks. You'd risk all of our sanity (which would result in the collapse of the 77th wealthiest "state" in the world!) if there wouldn't be more, faster, cheaper graphics boards. Really. It's damn important!

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[Anonymous Coward]

??? i play Urt (urban terror) also, in a kyro2 in that exact resolution and i get always 90 fps ( all options maxed out ) , you have probably some problem in your box (bad drivers irq sharing something)

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[ergo98]

Well the Kyro2 with its zbuffer culling is optimal for those dense urban environments, however it's features like ejecting brass that I have to disable, and the framerate takes a hit when 7 guys are all in the same room spamming each other with MP5s. There are additionally some areas of some maps where the framerate is only limited by my com_maxfps, but on others in certain areas I see my frame rate counter drop to low teens (i.e. certain areas of Rommel or specific areas of Swim). In other words I can go to a certain area of certain maps and puff my chest about a high FPS, but in real gameplay I do wish for more power freqently (and this is playing at what really is a poor 1024x768 : The same resolution games have been played at for about 4 years. Start cranking that up and even the best cards start begging for mercy).

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[MtViewGuy]

Question: what model motherboard are you running?

If it's an Abit, Asus, or other motherboard that allows you to seriously overclock, you might want to see if the motherboard will support a Socket 370 to Slot 1 adapter. That will allow you to run the Powerleap PL-370/T CPU upgrade (which should be released very soon); this will bump up the speed of your system from 450 MHz to 1,200 MHz! :-)

At 1,200 MHz CPU speed, even the Matrox G400-TV should be fast enough to run most modern games.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[darkwhite]

A low end GF4 is _not_ the same as a GF4ti 4200 or 4600 (I forget the low end designations). Anyway, iirc the low end GF4 is based on the same chip as the Xbox, only with fewer shader pipelines, while the high-end GF4 uses a new chip, more similar to GF3 than to the Xbox (obviously they all have similar features, but these have significant performance differences). As Carmack said recently, you don't want to buy a low-end GF4 to play future advanced shader-enabled games, because it doesn't have the hardware for that. Instead buy a high-end GF4 or a GF3 or a Radeon 8500+.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[MisterBlister]

FSAA just really doesn't make too much of a difference except at 640x480...

If you think it does, you're delusional.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[Anonymous Coward]

"At 1,200 MHz CPU speed, even the Matrox G400-TV should be fast enough to run most modern games."

Most games nowdays are GPU rather than CPU limited. Speaking as an G400Max owner, it's not enough to play most new 3D games even with a 1.2Ghz CPU. OTOH, a new PIII plus a GeForce3/4 should be fine.

Re:I'm happy with my old 32mb card

[Anonymous Coward]

...or you have a monitor that DOESN'T SUCK!

I'm deeply skeptical.

[rjh]

I've got a dual-proc P3/800 on my desk right now, a half-gig of RAM on an Apollo mobo. It has a single PCI card (a 3Com 905B Cyclone) and a GeForce 4 on the AGP slot. Now, what's my problem?

Everything about the damn GeForce.

First, it was having constant conflicts with Something-Or-Other during POST--I'd get a really annoying system beep and no video output, period. Yanked my SoundBlaster AWE32 and presto, it boots. Weird. Why was the GeForce 4 conflicting with my SB?

Now it works reasonably well, except that I'm forced to use my on-board AC97 audio (which sounds like ass, and esd really doesn't like it). Reasonably well, except for the occasional spontaneous reboot... which occurs for reasons I haven't been able to track down yet.

In Win2000 it's the same story--except that when I connect to the 'Net via my external modem (COM1), I'll randomly get a BSOD or a spontaneous reboot.

Why in the billion names of JR "Bob" Dobbs the GeForce 4 causes so many hardware conflicts, I have absolutely no idea.

When it's running, though, it's a pretty sweet board.

By comparison, my last card was a Voodoo3. Nice, simple AGP card; I plugged it in, it worked, never conflicted with anything.

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[lexcyber]

I have two dual machines. One dual pIII 600 on
a Aopen mobo. And one dual PIII 733 on a MSI
mobo. I have been experiencing lockups and
sudden rebboots on both machines. When using
various geforce cards. Everything from
GeForce 256 (sdr) to Geforce 3 64M. It is
very unstable and it mostly started after
nvidias release of the 6.xx drivers. So I
think they have done something that will make
SMP systems unstable. To get more juice out of
the cards. Since the 6.xx driver offered some
20% more fps in certain games.

I have tried to get some info from nvidia or
other sources on this subject. But I has been
unable to find any. I first tought it was my
current hardware setup that was the problem.
But now I have tried two different mobos and
some 5-6 different geforce cards (different
manufacturers to).

Its very annying in the long run since I am
also working with 3d computer graphics. And if
I work on a project I dont like a sudden
lockup.

-P

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have also had problems with all of my Ali and Via chipset motherboards in conjunction with Nvidia cards (viper 330, TNT, TNT2, GeForce 1,2,3 and now 4). I can count on always having hardware problems if I plan on using NVidia cards. When they work, they work sweet as you said, but boy when it wants to be a bitch or you didn't put the right crystals over the computer for that day, it will spell trouble. I dont know why after all the cards NVidia has made that they can still consitantly have problems, not once can I remember having problems with ATI, S3, or 3dfx.

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a better power supply. Junk power supplies will cause those symptoms. Oh, and save the 'But I have a 600W Sparkle in all my systems!' cover.

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're clearly INSANE if you think you will:
a. get SMP to work in any game based off the quake 3 engine
b. see any improvement on a geforce card if you get smp wokring in said engine.

the only way you will see an icrease in performance is if you are running a card without a GPU (tnt etc).

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[dFaust]

I've been running a Geforce256 DDR since the week of it's release on a dual celeron 366 using an abit bp6 motherboard. 640megs of sdram, 2 10/100 nics, a SIIG scsi2 card, a US Robotics 56k internal modem... geez, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Regardless, for years now in both NT4 and mostly Win2k, I've had NO such problems. NONE.

Maybe ultimately your problem -does- stem from your GF4... but I wouldn't be so quick to jump to the conclusion that it's the card's fault as opposed to a general, non-hardware-specific issue or whatnot (such as IRQ conflicts)

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[moogla]

I have a dual PII Xeon w/ GeForce3 Ti200 OC and I have no problems whatsoever in Linux and Win2k. I'm using the latest reference drivers as of about 3 months ago. What's up with your system?

While SMP isn't useful for Q3A, Tribes2, etc. it is nice to play MP3s, etc. while playing without a performance hit.

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[lexcyber]

I have never mentioned Quake3 or any other
game. - I am using my systems in 3dsmax R4+ and
Maya 4. And other professional 3d packages.

-P

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[Anonymous Coward]

GeForce cards aren't supported by "professional 3d packages."

Buy a supported card and then you can start submitting bugs or complaining about any problems with the software. Of course, if you are running pirated Maya on a $250 gaming card, you are getting just what you paid for.

Same goes for FireGL vs. Radeon.

Re:I'm deeply skeptical.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do know that nVidia cards are much more agressive with using the AGP feature set than ATI.

VIA also has the buggiest, crappiest AGP implementations on the market.

Those two things can lead to issues. Especially with Linux.

Avoid VIA like the plague!

HEY

[Forsh]

How can they post a story about a card that can only be fully realized under WIndows. Are you all thinking of converting to a real gaming box finally, and throwing out your l337 LiNux haXor box? I am happy to hear that....

Er....spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, come visit my site today! Better yet, post it on the front page of slashdot to lower chris' misstake down a bit!

Oh for the days of good code

[Hyperhaplo]

Wow. A new video card jam packed with electronic goodies humming with performance power.

Does anyone remember the days of good clean code and high performance? All this card does, AFAICS, is give developers more excuse to waste CPU, RAM and bandwidth. Bah. 'oh look! they have all this RAM and CPU power now: lets bloat!'

Yes, it's a nice card and thanks for the pointer toward the review. I just disagree with our current "we have the resources to waste!" attitude to coding. I can't wait for the 10G CPU, 2Gig ram and 1 Gig video card that's going to be required to run games on windows 2010.

Re:Oh for the days of good code

[Tim C]

If you have the resources, why not use them?

Seriously, what else is your machine doing while you're playing Quake3 or similar? It's not like you think "Well, that's the compile started, what can I do while I'm waiting? I know, how about a quick game of UT!"

I remember seeing a post to a newsgroup (c.o.l I think) from someone who'd just installed a bunch of RAM and was wondering why it was all being used. One reply explained what it was being used for (buffers and cache, of course), and said "no point having it if it's not going to be used!" Same thing applies here.

Sure, it's a bit rough on those of us with lower-end PCs (I have a GeForce3 Ti200, but "only" a P3 700), but them's the breaks. Time moves on and machine specs increase. Are you saying that games makers shouldn't target the machines that are going to be being sold at the time the game comes out? We'd still be playing Pac Man and Space Invader clones if that were the case. (Hell, Pong for that matter...)

Besides, I can assure you that games coders aren't thinking "How can I waste a few more cycles and a bit more RAM?". They're thinking of all the cool things that they wanted to do in their last game, but couldn't because the target hardware wasn't up to it, and how best to optimise it so that it runs acceptably on this game's target hardware.

Now, if you were to argue that an increasing number of games companies appear to be using flashy graphics and sound as a substitute for good, old fashioned gameplay, you might be on to something, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Cheers,

Tim

Re:Oh for the days of good code

[martissimo]

there's nothing wrong with playing a MUD or any of the other simple games that we used to play, but there is also nothing wrong with really cutting edge graphics that get better every year either.

I just disagree with our current "we have the resources to waste!

i disagree that the programs which will be designed to push newer cards are a "waste" of resources, but then again i do enjoy gaming... if you are happy with the graphics of older games you certainly dont have to upgrade. You have to face it though, if you plan on playing the latest games on your box you have to upgrade occasionally. It's the same in the console market, every once in a while you have to upgrade if you want to play the new stuff. If you're happy with the old stuff, then stick with it... and enjoy that extra money you save on something else ;)

Re:Oh for the days of good code

[dswan69]

OK, show me the games of the past that had all the features of a modern game, but ran in 16k. Doesn't exist.

OK, then just show me the OS plus GUI or app with all the modern features, but only needs 16k. Oh, doesn't exist either.

Yeah, applications and OSs have become somewhat bloated, but development time and maintainability come way ahead of trying to save a few clock cycles or a little RAM.

And if you're such a big fan of the highly optimised, unmaintainable code of the past then why aren't running that stuff instead of moaning?

Re:Oh for the days of good code

[Hyperhaplo]

Easy answer: I am.
And.. yes.. I do use the above, the GUI, the games, the bloated OS et al... but that doesn't mean so say that I like it.

However, the ultimate comeback here would be: "If you don't like it, do something about!". My reply to this unasked question: I am. :-) and thanks for asking.

Again, a point is conceeded to bloatware: it's very nice, and very useful. I am sincerely looking forward to seeing how hardware such as this will be utilized in the future. I await with baited breath to see the extensive uses that are explored. Meanwhile, I don't need it :)

PC Gaming

[mikedavis44]

With all the conjecture regarding XBox, PS2, GC of late, a new (high priced) release seems an ideal time to question the future of the PC stronghold(?) in the gaming market.

From memory, the new Nvidia card was listed at around $350, and it can be noted that the tests were performed on a high end processor with a healthy serving of ram. Although this concoction transparantly serves as a powerful pc for all your non-gaming needs, does this serve as a warning to building 'game boxes'?

Even against Sony's impressive software library, I would argue that the PC offers the best range of gaming (quaking etc.), but with M$ entering the console market, will this be the case in times to come and is it possible we are dawning on a separation of mainstream pc uses and gaming?

Food for thought anyway.

Re:PC Gaming

[Hyperhaplo]

You are referring to recent articles where M$ seems to be pushing games from the PC to a console so the PC can be the entertainment (har har) center of the house?

Well, fashions come and go every decade.. is it time for the games to move back to the console.. (only to have them come back to the PC in 5 years time?)

Re:PC Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I honestly don't think so. Or, at the least, that seperation has always been there.

The average console gamer, while suddenly springing forth the hundreds of dollars for a PS2 or X-Box and games, still doesn't wish to shell out the thousands (Well, around 2, if you shop around, less if you're patient and raid the bargain bin at EB ;)) for a high end gaming box with accompanying games.

There's the factor of utility and power. I can hook up my Sorny Dreambox up to the TV, and play a little Coors 16 Ouncer Drinking Contest on the weekends, but that's about it. My computer? If I get tired of Quake 15 1/2, I can go hack some kernel.

Computer gaming brings in a lot of cash to software companies. I don't look for it to go away anytime soon.

Re:PC Gaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even bother to read the preview? Because the card in the article will retail for only $179 and you will most likely be able to get it for much cheaper somewhere online.

slashdot front-page summary

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of you who like to read Slashdot on-the-go, here is a quick summary of today's articles, with handy Cliff Notes style discussion.

W2K and MAC OS9 Flood Root Nameservers? - Yes.
DIY Computer Video Microscopy For Under $50 - Yes.
CFP 2002 Wrapup - Yes.
dot.com Bust Gotcha Down? Try the Gubmint! - No thanks.
1770 Mechanical Chess Player Inspired Babbage - Not likely.
Wireless Carriers Accused of Antitrust Violations - Yes.
Star Wars Phantom Menace 1.1 Editor Speaks - Good job.
Spanish Province Dist-Upgrades - What?
The Lone Gunmen Are Dead - Who?

As for the current topic, GeForce4 Ti 4200 Preview, the answer is: Yes.

Re:slashdot front-page summary

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the current topic, GeForce4 Ti 4200 Preview, the answer is: Yes.

Correction.
The reel answer is: VARY GAY

Ur welcum. :):)

Re:slashdot front-page summary

[Graspee_Leemoor]

Nice one, heh heh, you just spoiled it for everyone who was psychic enough to block stories by chrisd in advance. ;)

graspee

Re:slashdot front-page summary

[HowlinMadMurphy]

Yeah, and I bet Nietzsche hated you. Even DESPITE being utterly unconcerned with what level you read Slashdot at. Even not giving a shit about what has got to be the single most annoying aspect of your meticulously disgusting character, I'm pretty sure all Germans hate you.

You sure you don't want to tell us how many squares of toilet paper you use?

I think when you say "reading at 0"... that's your grade-level right? What would that make it, preschool for you? Have you gotten to the part with the crayons yet? Or are you still watching the Teletubbies?

Post again when you decide what level your brain is at... *BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP!*

0W0000000000000000000000!

Re:slashdot front-page summary

[Anonymous Coward]

how bout you use that wasted intellect of yours to get a friggin research position like the rest of us and use it.
quit the job hunt -- go get a research position at a uni and prove that you are really as smart as you think you are. try solving a simple problem - take a snapshot of a random room and write a small program to analyse and identify every object in the room. think youre smart ? try and crack the puzzle.

Holy cow

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to have to upgrade from my Hercules Mono Graphics card.

Re:Holy cow

[NewtonsLaw]

I'm going to have to upgrade from my Hercules Mono Graphics card

Oh wow... you got a Hercules card?

Man, I was thinking of upgrading my text adaptor to one of those but I don't know if my old orange-phosphor CRT could handle it.

Of course what I really lust after is one of those BOB color cards. Man, they've got 640x350 pixels in sixteen (yes, count them... SIXTEEN) glorious colors!

What it must be like to be rich eh?

At least I've got 640K of RAM -- that's got to be more than anyone would ever need -- right Bill?

Re:Holy cow

[nomadic]

At least I've got 640K of RAM -- that's got to be more than anyone would ever need -- right Bill?

What's most irritating about that isn't that he misjudged, but rather that he didn't fix his mistake, making us all mess around with EMM386.exe for several years.

Re:Holy cow

[megabeck42]

Oh, wait.. not only did bill gates not say that.. no, he also wasn't even close to responsible for that limit.. the IBM PC designers made that decision when they put the framebuffer at A:0000-A:FFFF. (Yeah, I know Monochrome was at B:8000, but yeah, big deal.)

Basically, IBM engineers decided that from 0:0000 to A:0000 was decided upon as a reasonable amount of ram. That's 10 blocks of 65K, hence, the 640K limit. The rest of the space was used for memory mapped I/O.

Further, Bill would have loved to have not had to use EMM386 - that thing is/was a hack. And, Windows 95 onwards completely rewrite any magic that EMM386 does.

Re:Holy cow

[Shiny Metal S.]

Oh wow... you got a Hercules card? Man, I was thinking of upgrading my text adaptor to one of those but I don't know if my old orange-phosphor CRT could handle it.

Funny, but just FYI I do have a working Hercules and I'll tell you something: it displays 80x25 text mode as fast as your GeeForce78 5000000 (or whatever is c00l today), i.e. much faster than I can read. I use it in my web/mail/ftp/dns server with 500MHz AMD K6-2 and 256MB of RAM. The advantage is that the 14" monitor is in size (the depth) between the smallest new 14" CRT I've seen and 14" LCD (something in the middle). Works great. Very low power consumption (the card and the monitor). Total cost: $0. Great for servers where you need a display but you don't want to waste a lot of space and power.

Re:Holy cow

[batkiwi]

I had one of the original hercules cards, mainly got it for flight simulator. Thank god for 4 colors of orange...

But what's funny is right now I have a 1.1ghz athlon gaming machine with...

A hercules geforce2mx

talk about brand loyalty :)

Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[Animats]

The GeForce 3/4 line has been stuck at 64MB for a while now, and as a result, all the boards with GeForce 3/4 parts have roughly the same performance, within 25% or so. For marketing reasons, there are about half a dozen models, but not much difference between them (ignoring the GeForce 4 MX, which is a GeForce 2 engine, without the vertex or pixel shader hardware.)

Now, finally, a memory upgrade and a visible performance improvement.

Re:Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[brokenbeaker]

The performace difference across the series of cards is due to memory speed, not size. The 128 MB allows antialiasing at very high resolutions.

Re:Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[StompmotS]

128MB on GF3 doesn't make much of a difference compared with 64MB on today's games. http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/02q2/020418/v gacharts-01.html

Re:Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[Wordplay]

There are 128MB GeForce 3 Ti200s (no clue on the Ti500). It's just not a very popular configuration. Pity, too, because you can really see the different 128MB makes on heavily textured games, like Jedi Knight 2 and EverQuest.

Hopefully the GF4s will break that trend, since 128MB is the rule there, and not the exception.

Geo

Re:Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah my 128meg geforce4 goes twice as fast as my 64meg geforce2 mx! That extra memory really makes it fly!

Re:Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[batkiwi]

Someone give this guy the "clueless" sticker.

128mb vs 64 makes maybe 2-3% difference. They've benchmarked the same card (ti4200) with a 128 and 64mb model, and the 64mb model was FASTER due to more expensive ram.

THe BIGGEST difference in all the gf3/gf4 cards is the memory speed.

Graphics are still limited by fill rate in 90% of games, so if you have 10% faster memory, you get 10% faster framerate.

Problem is 10% faster memory costs 20% more, and so on, due to yield concerns.

All the 128mb vs 64mb will let you do is:
-run a higher res anti-aliased... but this doesn't matter if you dont have the speed
-use more textures... but all textures are now compressed in games (just about all) so they're not even filling up 64mb

Re:Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, games are only limited by fillrate on GF3 vs. Gf4 when you start running at 1280x1024 or with anisotropic filtering and FSAA.

One of the bigger performance limitations of the GF3/GF4 4x AGP cards is CPU memory bandwidth.

A 2.2 GHz Northwood P4 is the benchmark platform right now as it is the system with the greatest CPU memory bandwidth which is able to feed the graphics card the fastest. AMD's Hammer should help a bunch.

summary: At 1024x768 and below you are _almost_ totally CPU mem bandwidth limited on a GF3/4 at 4x AGP. However, new cards are important because we should all be running at 1280x1024, 4x anisotropic filtering, 4x FSAA, at 60 fps.

Enjoy...

Re:Finally, 128MB on a GeForce 3/4

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not 100% correct.

I hate (as much as anyone) listeing to people that believe graphics mem size == performance.

HOWEVER, modern cards (such as GF4 and GF3) and
current APIs (such as OpenGL 1.3 and D3D 8.x) allow you to cache compiled geometry (not just texture) on the graphics card which equals BIG performance improvement.

If you only need 64 MB of memory for each frame's textures, framebuffer, z-buffer, etc., then you can use the remaining 64 MB to cache geometry and reduce the load on the host connection bus and CPU memory bandwidth. This is BIG.

Add to that the advent of vertex shaders (programs that animate and manipulate the geometry) and more card memory will factor into performance with cacheable geometry even more.

Sure, some games won't use it but once Carmack starts...

benchmarks

[cdf12345]

Isn't is pointless to use current games to benchmark future videocards? I much rather like the idea of using the latest build of engines of future games (i.e. Unreal Tourney 2003) because it pushes the card harder than the final game will, plus it allows developers to fix bugs that arise before both the game and card is released.

Re:benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The 4200 is only like 1 month away from availability so it's hardly a future video card.
2. The game developers do use the latest cards when testing games, and I would think some might even get some early test boards from ATI and Nvidia to use and work out bugs, etc.
3. Do you really expect most game companies to just give out the latest build to anyone who asks for it because they want to do a review of a graphics card?

Re:benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it's be great, but developpers don't release the engines builds to avoid leaks. So that dude used the newest games he could find that used the latest tech. Better than just some Q3 and 3dmark scores posted by the majority of other review sites.

Kernel compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

When do we see a kernel compilation benchmark with this card??? ;)

Re:Kernel compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, the progress bar needs plenty of graphics processing ;)

Re:Kernel compile?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed! ;)

Wasted Money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, my good old TNT2 can handle anything currently out on the market. The difference in prettiness when upgrading from that to a card with onboard this and build-in that is very, very, very negligible.

Actually, the only thing it has problems with is EQ. And that's somewhat playable, and somewhat a moot point. EQ, graphically, sucks. It's ugly, and it trashes systems - I've seen it jittery on several GF3's, and even a GF4.

This really is degenerating into the processor war, or even Microsoft, where people are being urged to upgrade constantly. You might want to, but no thanks for me.

Though, I'll be snagging one of the GF4 MX series. You know, the "cheap" ones. Erm, yeah, gotta love how > $150 cards are "cheap". *snicker*

So I won't get to pretend I'm a cool little uber gamer. I don't care, I'd rather take the money I save and buy some Guinness. After all, the card will do everything I need it to do for years to come, just like the TNT2.

Re:Wasted Money?

[dswan69]

You'll better off with the GF4 4200 than with the top of the range MX version which is quite significantly crippled and only slightly cheaper.

Re:Wasted Money?

[ergo98]

Honestly, my good old TNT2 can handle anything currently out on the market. The difference in prettiness when upgrading from that to a card with onboard this and build-in that is very, very, very negligible.

Then why are you bothering reading the article or offering your wisdom on this? You are clearly not the target marget, despite your apparently sadness at being excluded.

"So I won't get to pretend I'm a cool little uber gamer. I don't care," but instead you're a ("I'd rather take the money I save and buy some Guinness.") uber alcoholic?

all these screenshots...

[koekepeer]

...make me wanna do just one thing. reboot into win98 and play quake :)

games are evil, and the largest threat to widespread use of opensource software...

Re:all these screenshots...

[Anonymous Coward]

so why don't you play quake on your linux box?

Re:all these screenshots...

[koekepeer]

because, ac, linux unfortunately has crappy support for my voodoo5-5500, which is prolly why i got such a good deal on it (that and the demise of 3dfx). besides that, i don't have money to buy one of these ubercards. that's why.

XFree86 and FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Any idea when the XFree86 drivers for FreeBSD for this card will be available? I don't run Windows, so these new graphics cards aren't any use to me until they run XFree86 on FreeBSD.

Re:XFree86 and FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

A sobering point: My FreeBSD box now (recently) can use my TNT2 card.

FYI: games and hardware

[edyu]

Maybe a little offtopic but:
I have made 3 empirical observations of the game industry:
1. Games are about 5 years behind cutting-edge graphics research (academica (SIGGRAPH), mostly.
2. The graphics/engine programmers generally have the best hardware in the graphics team to allow them to test out the latest hardware advancements
3. Games nowadays takes around 2-3 years that the cutting edge hardware they use at first will become midranged by the time game got released.

I don't get it...

[ferrocene]

The reviewer's setup:

"The following is a list of the hardware and software used in this preview.

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ @ 1.53GHz
NVIDIA Reference Motherboard (nForce Chipset)
256MB Corsair PC2400 DDR RAM
21-Inch Sony Multiscan E500 Monitor
NVIDIA Reference GeForce4 Ti 4600 (300MHz/650MHz) - 128MB
NVIDIA Reference GeForce4 Ti 4200 (250MHz/500MHz) - 64MB
NVIDIA Detonator XP Driver Version 28.32
32-Bit Color / Sound Disabled * / Vsync Disabled / 75Hz Refresh Rate
Windows XP Professional / DirectX 8.1"

Ok, you're reviewing a card with 128mb of video memory, yet your main system memory is only 256mb? On WinXP? Dude, just shell out the extra $$ for at least 512. Unless using 2 DIMM's somehow cuts your performance. Who's using 256? Compaq?

Re:I don't get it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason the GF3 and GF4 perform about the same on this setup at 1024 x 768 is because the graphics cards are starved by the CPU's memory badwidth limitation.

The story would be different on a faster CPU.

Good stuff...

[Moonshadow]

nVidia continues to impress me. They continue to raise the bar for hardware, and they are enabling programmers to beef up their poly counts, particle systems, etc.

Yummy. I want one.

You my friend....

[Nickovsky]

Are a complete fucktard.... Thank you.

color me stupid...

[ferrocene]

But why do you need antialiasing at 1600x1200? Can anyone honestly see the pixels at that res?

The average user doesn't need his screen being blurred, the monitor does that well enough for him/her

"omg timmy! did you see those jaggies!"
"dude, don't be a magnafying glass hog!"

Re:color me stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

But why do you need antialiasing at 1600x1200? Can anyone honestly see the pixels at that res?

The human eye resolution is of 1/60 of a degree. So your screen resolution will match your eye resolution (i.e you'll see the jaggies) if your distance to the screen is X times the width of your screen (or closer), where

X = 360*60/(2*PI*1600) = 2.15

So I'm afraid you'd have to stand as far as 4 times the width of your screen to blur the jaggies with your eyes at 1600x1200 resolution (assuming you have a good vision).

(Sorry, I just feel like calculating stuff tonight.)

Re:color me stupid...

[cyr]

Antialiasing isn't just blurring the image, it is actually putting more than one "sample" of information into every pixel.

1600x1200 4xFSAA is like a 3200x2400 pixel screen, slightly blurred.

Re:color me stupid...

[Wordplay]

You wouldn't think it'd make a difference, but it does. At that resolution, it's not so much jaggies as it is texture crawling and shimmering. Anti-aliasing fixes both.

Geo

Re:color me stupid...

[Merlin42]

Not to be annoying, but actually I think it is more appropriate to say that it is removing information from the image. The theory behind antialiasing ti to remove aliasing (duh ;). Where aliasing is caused be having visual information that is at a higher frequency than the sampling frequency (800x600, 1600x1200 ....) So when properly done it removes high frequncy information. On high end SGI's and profesional cards like 3Dlabs wildcat boards it is done *BEAUTIFULLY*. The difference is just stunning. I have a GeForce3Ti at home and with antialiasing on I still get texture shimmer and crawling edges(temporal aliasing) that can be annoying, especially since I have seen how good anti-aliasing can be.

Kevin

Re:color me stupid...

[Big_Breaker]

I think what the above poster is saying is that anti-aliasing on the geforce involves "downsampling" a much higher resolution render drawn from multiple render angles. Atleast that's the algorithm I recall for geforce cards.

While you are focusing on the downsampling process the above poster is focusing on the hi-res source for the downsampling generated from the multiple renders.

I agree with you in the sense that the downsampling does create a pleasant correlation both in time and space between neighboring pixels. That correlation is indicative of lower "information theory" style information. For instance I bet anti-aliased screen shots would compress better.

Re:color me stupid...

[NormalVisual]

Antialiasing is effectively low-pass filtering of the image, and thus is actually *removing* data from the image - you want to remove a lot of the high-frequency components (i.e. the jaggies). You artificially increase the number of samples (by means of virtually rendering in a higher resolution) in order to make this filtering easier and more effective - you see the same principle at work in CD players, where oversampling makes it possible to do most of the filtering digitally instead of trying to design and build an analog low-pass filter with a really sharp cutoff.

Re:color me stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost all monitors (even the 20" ones) that consumers are using/own do not have the pixel mask to run 1600 x 1200. So, in a way, they are anti-aliasing (bluring) their 1600x1200 anyway.

If you do have a tube or FP that does true (or native) 1600 x 1200 then FSAA still helps.

Yes, you can still see pixels at that res although most consumers don't really have monitors that can accurately display it.

Re:color me stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

While the 8x multisampling on a $100,000 SGI
InfiniteReality can hardly be touched, there are
many features that a GF4 has that it does not.

As far as AA goes, the GF4 has anisotropic
filtering which the IR does not without using
multiple passes. The GF4 multisampling FSAA is
also vastly better than previous cards (and the
ATI 8500's supersampling).

The GF4 will also do 60 Mpolys/sec peak to the IR's ~15 Mpolys/sec peak.

I wish PCs had the IR's clipmapping.

BTW, some of the parents of the IR are at Nvidia and other PC gfx companies now.

The Wildcat has good AA but at $3K compared to cards that outperform it for $1K... 3Dlabs also
just went out of business and had to sell to Creative Labs. They are going consumer with
their next chip. Should be interesting to see if they can compete with ATI and nvidia.

Re:color me stupid...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some antialiasing is as you discribe.

You just discribed supersampling (which is what
ATI does).

The GF3/4 do multi-sampling which is taking more
than one sub-pixel sample per pixel. It is higher quality than supersampling.

Information about the two is widely available.

Re:color me stupid...

[cyr]

Well, yes... you remove information from a larger image. The resulting smaller image contains more accurate information than a smaller non-AA image.

The smaller image can of course not contain all the information of the larger image, but consider a single black pixel in the large image.

If we had sampled the same scene directly at the lower resultion we would have a 25% chance to get this black pixel, and a 75% chance to miss it entirely. By taking this larger image and downsampling it we get a 100% chance of a 25% black pixel. We can't tell in which "corner" of the pixel the dot should have been, but we do see that there is a dot.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as "more information" but it's certainly a more usefull image.

old news

[htmlboy]

i'm a bit confused as to why this particular preview was deemed better than all the others with the same information. hardocp.com posted their preview on the 8th and added another segment on the 10th (other sites reviewed it in the same timeframe, but hardocp is the one i read). so this particular ti4200 preview is old news. slashdot keeps wandering into the hardware news arena, but doesn't seem to pay quite enough attention to do it well.

Re:old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting comment, but did the other GeForce4 Ti 4200 previews concentrate on game play? Did any of them cover antialiasing image quality? Did any of the reviewers spend two weeks stress testing the card by playing games? Which preview looked at performance in IL-2 Sturmovik which is today's most popular flight sim? I could go on and on, but I think you get the point.

Re:old news

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that! Most reviewers just care about pumping the review full of BS benchmarks and getting it published ASAP. The dude must have spent tons of time working on this one.

Is this so special?

[Gerb]

Tom's hardware already reviewed this card on April the 9th. You can find it here.

Gerb

Re:Is this so special?

[Phosphor3k]

The new review is on a mobo with an nFornce chipset, the old one isnt. It can make a difference.

Truly

[Anonymous Coward]

Truly the best (p)review in months of computer games/graphic cards.

Nice screen shots, and above all frame rates at 1600x1200 and above!!!

Pushing the limits of how a review should be done!

Tom's Hardware may better be more innovative now, while still retaining back compability.

Ignore the NASCAR Racing 2002 observations.

[Blaede]

He used the demo, which is an old unoptimized build, and gives terrible performance in all aspects, which is nowhere simlilar to the retail release. The retail release is markedly better, and is a better testbed for benchmarking, and includes OpenGL.

Looks like the real deal!

[stevarooski]

Seems that Nvidia's counter to ATI's cheap 128mb Radeon card went over rather well with reviewers.

If you want some more information, here's some good reviews/articles I saw today during my daily browsing:

• AnandTech
  
• GameSpot
  

Compare these numbers against Nvidia's previous attempt at the budget arena, the MX 440 here. A much needed improvement!

Super nice!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Very good preview. The GF4 generation GPU is mighty strong, and I disagree with those people that are saying that they don't need a GF4. I have bought a GF3 Ti200 recently and I don't plan to update anytime soon, but I am already envy of those guys that can afford a GF4 and a cool plasma 34" screen.

Get a grip dudes. Even if you don't like it, GF4 IS progress. What I am worried about though is the competition. Will ATI have the power to respond with an equally good video card ? if it doesn't and NVIDIA stays the only player in the graphics card market, we are doomed, and open source OSs especially.

Linux friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

Geforce 4200 is currently the best choice. It's relatively cheap compared to performance and it's 100% LINUX FRIENDLY hardware.

HEY

[Forsh]

I am sorry if the truth hurts...
...but welcome to reality.

here we go again

[Gizzmonic]

It's Spring, and the need for a new video card presents itself. Why? Because the one you bought 6 months ago is "outdated," meaning it doesn't get the highest FPS on some benchmark site like the one whored in this article.

So is it time to drop the $400? To rely on buggy drivers rushed out by ATi or nVidia? To snarl at DirectX's mysterious problems, which may or may not be related to some of your older hardware not agreeing with your new card?

You've stared at the numbers on the site, and you don't see any reason why not. Did you know some sites exist (and make money) just by getting new video cards and "benchmarking" (aka "playing") them? Is this fair? Are you going to contribute to this universally unfair practice? Of course, you clicked through to buy from the first vendor listed on the site. You can hardly wait for the UPS man to come tomorrow (you can afford expedited shipping, you only paid 95% of what you'd pay at a retail store anyway).

As a savvy PC gamer, you've already downloaded the latest crack off Usenet. You never pay for software-why should you? The hardware costs enough as it is, besides, each game on the PC is just an iteration of Doom or Command and Conquer. Brainless blowing away, or boring resource management? You love 'em both. Or at least, they're available, and you play them.

You laugh at your buddies with an Xbox, because "I can build a more powerful system than that for half the cost!" You've scorned the Gamecube because "The Gamepurse is for kiddies!" Your Playstation 2, purchased for Final Fantasy X, lies collecting dust next to your DVD player (which sucks compared to the one on your computer-NATCH!)

You pause a bit to think about your computer purchases over the last year:

• Athlon T-bird and motherboard-$250.

• Athlon XP and motherboard-$400.

• "L337" Custom Water Cooled Case-$300

• 1 Gig RAM (purchased 256MB at a time)-$400.

• SB Audigy-$95.

• GeForce 3-$350.

Now this GeForce 4 will be about $400, but it's worth it! Buy a Mac? Never! They don't have games, and besides, they're too expensive.

Buyer's remorse never seizes your temples with its steely vice grip. You'll never lose your job at the helpdesk, and even if you do, Mom and Dad will be there to help you out. You're a sharp guy, and you're surely going places. Right after this game of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that is...

Re:here we go again

[dswan69]

GeForce4 4200 $200

Re:here we go again

[MiTEG]

This reminds me, a Fry's Electronics had an ad in the paper today that I was really tempted by. Their website, Outpost.com, has the same product for about twice the price. Anyway, the deal is you get a Duron 950 CPU with a motherboard and case with a 300W PSU for $99. Add a fan, drives, video card, and RAM, and you have yourself a pretty killer machine for around $300. That's less than the GF3 Ti500, and it would require some top of the line games to notice much of a difference. Anyway, check it out, outpost has it listed for $179.00 but I can pick it up at Fry's for $99.

Re:here we go again

[fktup]

The Geforce4 that is being previewed is 179-199$ usd. While I find your post amusing and your point valid. I despise people who comment on articles before reading them, well I hope you did not read it anyway.

Re:here we go again

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe, just maybe, you're wrong.

My machine is using hardware that's around 2 years old, and I'm feeling the urge to splurge a little.

Current box:
Athlon 550@700
320MB PC133
GF2-V overclocked to GTS performance.

And I figure that for $500, I can upgrade that to an AthlonXP 1800, 512MB DDR, new motherboard, and a Ti4200 and get across-the-board performance in everything. And so I happen to be particularly interested in his benchmarks because his system is strikingly similar to the one I am considering building.

Don't necessarily assume that anyone considering one of these cards just plunked down the big change for the top card last year. Come on... let's THINK here.

Amongst other news...

[Forsh]

Someone needs to tell those "l337 LiNux" haXorz that it's a doggy-dogg world. The good guys do not always win. In this world you either layeth the smaketh, or you get smacked. Talking shit about Bill Gates gets nothing done. And everyday my gaming experience gets better, while your penguin spandex gets worn out. Like it or not.

Your problem

[Anonymous Coward]

is incompatibility between an old motherboard and the newest graphics card. Does your mobo support 4xAGP? What about sideband adressing or fastwrite?
It's like putting a v8 in a mini...it can be done, but you have to make sure the rest of the system supports it.
Also, RTFM...look at your BIOS settings.

Re:Your problem

[rjh]

You obviously have no idea how old (or new) my mobo is. Yes, it supports 4x AGP. Yes, it supports everything you mentioned. Please check out the specs for the Apollo dual-proc mobos before you tell me what is, or isn't, the problem. Yes, I have RTFM. Yes, I have looked at my BIOS settings. Yes, the problems still persist.

Windows

[PsychoElf]

I had this similar problem running win2k, it all happened after i installed my audigy ex. ended up ripping the sucker out and it worked. called creative and come to find out its windows. win2k developed more on irq sharing than win98. check to see if all your stuff is on the same irq (mine was), if it is, you can always reinstall windows -irq sharing. just search microshaft's website for details. By the way, Im running 850 Duron 640MB Ram Geforce2 Ultra Audigy EX Platinum Fans Galore Cathode Light 12X DVD 12X TDK burner All on a 300 watt Antec power supply--no problems so far

Windows

[PsychoElf]

Funny, I thought that was the requirements for Windows XP(exponential bloat)

DDR

[PsychoElf]

ummm, thats DDR Ram, comparable to 512 of the pc133 most of us are running. Windows XP(exponential bloat) requires pc133, not ddr, so it still works out fine.

Re:DDR

[jandrese]

boggle How do you figure that? DDR (Double Data Rate) referrs to the speed at which the system can pull data from the chips, it has nothing to do with the size of the memory (which was the original posters point, 256 MB with WinXP is swap city once you start running moderatly memory hungry apps (like games!)).

I'm shocked...don't you know what framerate really

[Anonymous Coward]

The human eye cannot distinguish more than 24 frames per second...at 23 fps you can see some chop, at 25 you can't. That's because the brains "refresh rate" for incoming info from the eyes is at 24 fps.
Therefore, anything beyond 24 fps is USELESS! Basic biology, folks! And still we get these idiots going "hey it runs at 30 fps!". You can't see that! Your brain cannot cope with more than 24 still pictures per second before it "runs them together" to make moving images.

It would be nice to see a review...

[I.T.R.A.R.K.]

...of one of these cards to see which ones fare best in the 3d rendering and animation scene.
Who cares if I can run Quake 3 at 200fps? I want to know how quickly the card can render a 16.5 million polygon scene(my last project, to be exact) with raytraced shadows, ansiotropic/blinn/metal shading, and reflections with 9+ levels of tracing.

Re:It would be nice to see a review...

[Anonymous Coward]

The preview was done by a gamer for gamers. There are plenty of reviews of the professional cards out there for you. You just have to look for them.

Do you only play games?

[pointwood]

As with almost all graphic card reviews, the only tests/benchmarks this review has is games. I don't know about the rest of you, but I actually don't play games the majority of the time I'm using my PC and therefore this review is sadly almost useless to me.

I would like to see a review that actually had a serious focus on 2D performance and quality.

No matter what, I'll not buy a Geforce4 card - AFAIK they have and need active cooling and I don't need that - I want a card with passive cooling! A Geforce3 TI200 should actually be able to run with only a nice large heatsink and that is what I believe I'll be buying soon. It is much cheaper too and it's 3D performance is still excellent.

Re:Do you only play games?

[Wordplay]

Every GF3 Ti200 I've seen has a fan, and needs it. It's very quiet fan (on my Siluro)...probably about 25db, and a relatively low pitch...but it is a fan. You could run it in a quiet PC without a problem, I think, but if you expect noiseless, you're out of luck. I run a quiet PC, and I'm OK with it...I can only barely hear it in the middle of my other voltage-reduced fans....but you might be pickier than I am.

You'll have to go down to a GF2 MX or TNT2 before you get a card that doesn't need a fan at all. Your 2D performance will be roughly the same as the GF3 (though the 2D quality is noticeably higher on the later nVidia cards), but 3D performance will be significantly worse.

Geo

Re:Do you only play games?

[pointwood]

I'm pretty sure I'm correct since the Nvidia Geforce3 TI200 reference card came with passive cooling only ;)

A lot of cards only come with a fan because it "looks cool" - not because they need it. It's the same thing with motherboards and the chipset. A lot of motherboards makers put a small heatsink and a fan on it, even though a larger heatsink would be enough. Take the latest boards with the Via KT333 chipset - a lot of the boards have a fan on the chipset - the Asus boards doesn't.

Re:Do you only play games?

[Wordplay]

Hm. You're right, re: reference. I'd forgotten about that. Still, none of the manufacturers went with it. It may be market pressure, and it may be stability. I guess you'll find out. :)

FWIW, I was able to get one hell of an overclock on my card, with a pretty craptastic heatsink and a thin fan. I guess given that, you probably -will- be able to run at stock speeds with a heatsink and decent airflow.

Still, don't pull off the fan until you've tried it. Unless you're running a fanless system, I'll lay odds you won't hear the GF3 fan. Assuming your design doesn't divurge much from the one I have, it's really quiet.

Geo

Re:Do you only play games?

[Tower]

Nothing I've used has come close in 2-D quality and performance to the Matrox cards I've owned (Millennium, G200, G400)... In fact, the 4MB PCI Millennium that I got in 1996 easily outpaced the TNT2 cards from several years later in 2D performance, and the quality difference was staggering. The Geforce2MX400 that I have is great for games, but my Matrox G400 is superbly sharp in the high res modes - it *is* tough to accurately drive an older 21" monitor with no ghosting, waving, and good color definition.

Re:Do you only play games?

[Anonymous Coward]

2D is going to be moot soon anyway, as soon as M$ moves to a 3D GUI, everyone else will follow.

Re:Do you only play games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Matrox used to be the 2D quality leaders but that
is history. The GF4 MX series uses 350 MHz
RAMDACs and equal Matrox with a mainstream card.
DVI makes all of this moot.

Also, their MX cards have very good 3D performance
and passive cooling. No vertex or pixel shaders
though.

I fear Matrox is doomed unless they start spending
money and coming up with something to replace 2+
year old chip designs that were behind the day
they launched.

Re:Do you only play games?

[Anonymous Coward]

Matrox is doomed.
Here is one of the reasons why:

http://www.tweakers.com.au/articles/graphics/nv_ 20 0nvs/page1.asp

Re:I'm shocked...don't you know what framerate rea

[spectecjr]

The human eye cannot distinguish more than 24 frames per second...at 23 fps you can see some chop, at 25 you can't. That's because the brains "refresh rate" for incoming info from the eyes is at 24 fps.
Therefore, anything beyond 24 fps is USELESS! Basic biology, folks! And still we get these idiots going "hey it runs at 30 fps!". You can't see that! Your brain cannot cope with more than 24 still pictures per second before it "runs them together" to make moving images.

Repeat after me:

24 frames per second is the minimum required for fusion.

48 frames per second is the minimum required for lack of flicker. (Movies show at 48fps - didn't you know that? Each frame is shown twice, with a gap in between).

Anything higher than that, up to about 100fps, is better. Above 100fps, qualititative judgement of smoothness is pretty much impossible.

Don't believe me? Look at your 60fps (or 50fps) television set out of the corner of your eye - you'll see flicker.

Or, alternatively, if you're american, go to Europe and watch TV there. The flicker will drive you to DISTRACTION (NTSC = 60fps; PAL = 50fps). It's PLAINLY visible.

So in other words, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Don't assume that just because you heard somewhere that 24fps is the slowest speed at which images join together to make a moving image, that you can't see any difference between that and higher frame rates.

Simon

Re:heatsinki

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing as how this was a preview of a card that hasn't been released yet, thats they kind of heatsink you get. Once it is released, the card makers will put whatever heatsink they think it needs on it.

Re:Italians do it better

[spectecjr]

Im from Italy and I go mad when I visit the States, because they got such lousy television sets in the hotels!! It really hurts my eyes!! My own television is capable of displaying the picture at 100Hz.

... only because your TV set shows each frame 4 times. :-)

Si

Is it just me

[CyberDruid]

...or did 3D-gaming get old several years ago. Granted - Doom was damn cool. Ultima Underworld was nice too. The zillionth FPS was just a yawn.

In the mid 90s, for some reason, something happened. Suddenly the mainstream opinion was that a game without 3D was somehow inferior to the 3D ones, so *everything* had to be 3D. Face it - 3D is just a gimmick like anything else. For most games, 3D is just wrong. It makes the interface bad and worsens gameplay. We humans are by nature not fully 3D-compliant (e.g see Rubik's Cube for proof). Imagine what a pain in the ass a 3D window manager would be (yeah I know some people research it, but that is their problem, isn't it?).

IMHO games are now in the childish state of "the more real it looks, the better". Now, I am certainly not opposed to the idea of beautiful games. I want stunning, great looking games. But where would art be today if it had stopped at the rather primitive notion that the painting that most resembles reality is the most beautiful?

I don't know about you, but when Heroes of Might & Magic III came out (New World Computing makes arguably the most beautiful 2D-graphics in the world), I was far more impressed by the beautiful details and the general mood that they managed to generate, than by the graphics of Quake III (or whatever FPS-clone was the current rave then).

Don't get me wrong, there are games that benefit from 3D (Tekken comes to mind), but not *all*. Is there even a non-3D game available for the xbox?
Damn the lemming mentality of the game publishers... Will I ever see stunning artwork again?

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn the lemming mentality of the game publishers... Will I ever see stunning artwork again?

No.
Nore are you likely to hear anything deeper or more profound than Titany Spears in the music world, either.

Pablum sells; art does not. That is why you only have "the mainstream" and nothing else (eg no punk, no alternative movement -yes, you have copies of said movements...but not with the substance of the real thing. Blink 182 is NOT the dead kennedys.)

Suppose I shoulda used rant tags. :)

Point being, it's all crap; and there are no alternatives to the crap. So go play ultima or whatever and Deal With It.

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe humans are not "3D compliant" because we are trained to work with 2D interfaces. There are people who have no problem thinking threedimensional and for some professions this is a necessity. 3D interfaces are complicated because they are really 2D pictures of 3D interfaces and gaming controllers are usually 2D controllers.

Re:Is it just me

[ZigMonty]

One of the coolest games out for the mac is EV Nova. It's a simple 2D game that features very rich game play. It's rare these days. Sad.

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

...or did 3D-gaming get old several years ago. Granted - Doom was damn cool. Ultima Underworld was nice too. The zillionth FPS was just a yawn.

Yes, it's just you.

Re:Is it just me

[hoggoth]

Don't worry- the same thing happened to the art world when making realistic paintings first became possible. Then the camera make it irrelevant and art reacted by moving away from photo-realism. The same will happen in computer graphics and games. Once we have perfected photorealism it will become passe and new areas of creativity will be explored.
My guess is when 'Final Fantasy' (the movie) level graphics appear in games we will see a reaction against photo-realism and see some really creative ideas start popping up (most really terrible, but some great).

Re:Is it just me

[darkwhite]

Yeah, I guess it's just you.

Personally, I have recently been stunned by the quality of the graphics in Serious Sam 2E. I thought I wouldn't see anything more beautiful than Unreal/UT before U2 came out. I was wrong.

And what's wrong with playing the old games? I have wasted some major time recently on replaying Crusader and X-COM. Kickass games are worth keeping and replaying.

Keep in mind that good games come out rarely. That doesn't mean they don't ever come out.

Re:Is it just me

[ziggles]

It sounds to me like you're just an old gamer stuck in his old generation of games. I'm sorry to hear it.

I haven't had your problems...

[Artifex]

I'm using a Visiontek TI 4600, and haven't had any problems with it - I'm using an Athlon XP 1800+ with a Soyo Dragon+ (using the Via chipset that everyone complains is buggy), but installation was a snap, replacing my Creative Labs 32MB Savage 4 Pro card. And I'm using Win2k and the onboard 6.1 audio and 100BT, "to boot"...

If it is the GeForce4, it's probably your particular card.
Did you try taking it back for a replacement, before telling us all how bad it is?

More likely you have some weird BIOS issues or power problems... you should check those, too.

Re:I haven't had your problems...

[lexcyber]

I have only had problems using SMP systems. Not
single cpu-systems. Ranging from piii 500 to P4
1700 With 256-1,5G ram.

-P

Re:I haven't had your problems...

[MtViewGuy]

More likely you have some weird BIOS issues or power problems... you should check those, too.

I think that could be part of the troubles.

I wonder does clearing the CMOS NVRAM and getting a decent 300 watt ATX power supply will help things along. Believe me, I've seen where clearing the CMOS NVRAM on the the motherboard fixes a LOT of Windows 9x/ME/2000/XP Plug and Play setup issues.

Re:I haven't had your problems...

[Artifex]

I wonder does clearing the CMOS NVRAM and getting a decent 300 watt ATX power supply will help things along.

Yah... I keep my BIOS as barren as possible, and I use a 400-watt in my tower =) Although from reading other comments, there may be a real issue with some SMP systems that people have...

Re:I haven't had your problems...

[rjh]

Yes, I did take it back for a replacement. Replacement does the exact same things. It's not a "weird BIOS issue", given that in the pursuit of solving this problem I've disabled just about everything that could be doing it--disabled AGP 4x, gone from 256M window to 16M, etc. Problem still persists.

Which do you recommend ?

[Taco Cowboy]

I want to creat 3D animation - the choice of animation software isn't yet set. The ones that I am looking at are Lightwave, Maya, 3DS Max, Blender and POVRay.

Which one do you recommend ?

On hardware side, which graphic card do you recommend ?

I am sticking with the X86 platform, OS can be Windoze, Linux, BSD, or BeOS.

All suggestions will be very much appreciated !

Thanks in advance !!

Re:Which do you recommend ?

[Rcoonz]

Go for Softimage XSI Linux Version!!!!!! and a good opengl card..would be...GeForce3 and up...if you want to have some good good realtime shading!!!

Re:Which do you recommend ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Lay off the speed. You just negated any value to your recommendation by using more than one exclamation mark.

Re:Which do you recommend ?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the listed application software, the only NVIDIA graphics cards that are certified and supported are the Quadro series of cards.

They also have additional OpenGL features and performance due to hardware and software that is not found or enabled with the GeForce series of cards.

It used to be that they were the exact same chip and a board ID told the driver to enable or disable the Quadro specific features. With NV25 and NV25GL they are actually different chips now.

The Quadro 900 XGL just passed the Wildcat (including the Wildcat III) as the fastest OpenGL workstation card on the market.

We are finishing up our evaluation of the Quadro4 cards and will probably move over to these from our current FireGL4 cards. ATI's support and drivers suck and the FireGL's are going away. The FireGL 8800 is just a Radeon with a FireGL name on it.

Again, for professional graphics software (DCC/CAD), the only certified and supported cards are FireGL, Wildcat, Oxygen, and Quadro to name the main players in the market.

The feature list you get over the consumer gaming cards is too long to list here. Plus, when you call for support because something doesn't work (greater than 3 OpenGL windows) or the performance sucks, A|W, discreet, Newtek, Avid will tell you to piss off with your consumer card.

Just an FYI...

Framerate != refresh rate

[Anonymous Coward]

Framerate is the rate at which the CPU/video card renders frames into video memory. Refresh rate is the rate at which the monitor shows images.

For instance, if you have a 100Hz monitor (which is pretty good) and you're playing some suitably old game which your fast graphics card can render at 200fps, half the frames rendered never get displayed. OTOH, if you play Quake 3 at 25fps, your monitor displays each frame 4 times.

If you don't see a new frame often enough, you see "choppiness" (the game looks like a series of still images). Since even really bad monitors refresh fast enough to avoid this, you see continuous motion (possibly not on some older LCD screens, see below) unless your graphics card can't render new frames fast enough to keep up. You quote 48fps and the parent post quotes 24fps; these seem like a reasonable range for the threshold, although it'll almost certainly vary depending who you are and how fast your eyes/optic nerve/brain work.

On the other hand, a CRT (Cathode Ray Tube, the technology used in ordinary monitors and TVs) only displays one pixel at a time - as long as the pixel that gets displayed moves across the screen fast enough, you see it as a large image instead, but if it's not quite fast enough you see it flickering. Below about 60-80Hz (depends on the person, apparently most people can't see 70Hz monitors flickering, but I'm quite sensitive to flicker) is unpleasant to watch when you're as close to the screen as a computer user; most people can't see a 100Hz monitor flickering at all. (If you look at a monitor out of the corner of your eye it seems to flicker more, because the cells around the edge of your retina are better at detecting motion).

LCD screens (and for that matter film projectors, as used in cinema) are quite usable at what would be a stupidly low refresh rate for a CRT, because the whole screen is active at any one time, so the "refresh rate" is just the rate the screen can accept data at. As a result, LCD screens will limit your effective framerate more than traditional CRTs (so they might look choppy), but they don't look flickery.

A better one

[MagPulse]

A better preview, done weeks ago, by a more reputable site:

[H]ard|OCP's first Ti4200 preview

[H]ard|OCP's second Ti4200 preview

Re:I'm shocked...don't you know what framerate rea

[Anonymous Coward]

AND

fps figures quoted from games are usually averages. Figures in benchmarks are just used for card comparisons..... If the MINIMUM refresh rate falls below 48/24 whatever, you'll notice it. A faster card is less likely to dip below the minimum. One more thing. I can tell the difference between 80 and 100 fps average in Q3 quite easily.

What it's missing..

[IAmBlakeM]

is a comparison between the 64MB and the 128MB version. He tests the 64MB version time and time again, but then tosses in a reccommendation for the 128MB card at the end? A little explanation would be nice.

The 64MB card, at the stock clock of 500Mhz, outperforms the 128MB card at 444Mhz in almost every single test, obviously because of the large difference in memory bandwidth available from memory to core and back. The HardOCP review of the same card shows the 64MB card beating the 128MB by a few FPS in almost every test. The 128MB card should be the one sought after, but only because the memory on the 128MB card can be overclocked to exceed to 500Mhz memory spc on the 64MB card. You can always overclock the 128MB card, but you can't add more memory to the 64MB one.

Wish reviewers did a little better job of explaining why the reccommend things.

Re:What it's missing..

[Anonymous Coward]

There we a number of references in the preview as to why 128MB is preferred to 64MB.

Re:Good stuff!!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I find it kind of funny that this sub $200.00 dollar card beats the $250.00+ dollar geforce 3 cards in both price and performance.

It shows you how crooked the video card industry really is.

www.tomshardware.com has reviews on this card as well...a little easier to comb through in my opinion.

Huh?

[denjin]

What are you talking about? Memory capacity matters here. DDR is faster than PC133, but it certainly doesn't mean that a stick of DDR is worth over 2x more capacity-wise...

I expect GeForce4 Ti4200 to sell in large numbers

[MtViewGuy]

I think a decent graphics card that uses the GeForce4 Ti 4200 will end up being extremely successful in the marketplace.

There are two reasons for this:

1) It is less expensive to implement, so OEM's will be far more interested in installing this card instead of the much more expensive cards that use the Ti4400 or Ti4600 chipsets. Besides, the performance drop is not significant, so most users won't see any performance hits on even the latest games. This is why I expect many system builders to incorporate graphics cards that use the GeForce4 Ti4200 chipset onto new systems on a large scale by July 2002.

2) Because it is an NV25 chipset, it also means that the card will sport higher-level MPEG-2 decoding support. That means hardware assistance for playing back DVD discs as good as what ATI has done with their Rage 128 and Radeon chipset series.

I think you must like the Matrox G400/G450/G550 cards. Yes, they have excellent 2-D display, but the GeForce4 Ti4200 has vastly surpassed it in 3-D graphics and with the right manufacturer achieved almost as good 2-d quality display.

Re:I'm shocked...don't you know what framerate rea

[Anonymous Coward]

Right. Another thing to consider is that TV/movies don't exactly coorelate with computers when it comes to FPS. With TV cameras, you get a built in motion blur due to the shutter being open for some ammount of time for each frame. With computers, each frame is just one instance in time. So you need more frames out of the computer to compensate for the lack of motion blur.

Remember, our eyes aren't digital, only sampling the scene 24 evenly spaced time a second. They take all the data the comes in during a 1/24th of a second and combine it to make the scene.

Hows the TMDS?

[4of12]

I've been looking to find good video cards for high resolution flat panel monitors but want them to be driven digitally instead of with an analog signal (even one sneaking in through the analog connectors in the DVI-I connector).

But really high resolution displays have been made useless for many graphics cards that only support resolutions up to 1280x1024 or 1600x1200.

I had hoped that the recent nVidia chipsets would have some good TMDS hardware.

Do they?

Re:Italians do it better

[listen]

Hm, you really are dumb.

It displays it twice.

Pal is at 50 Hz.

Re:Italians do it better

[Anonymous Coward]

50 Hz PAL displays each picture twice to begin with though. You only get 25 complete frames a second.

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

how is this offtopic? stupid moderators!!

I think you're missing the point

[elliotj]

Whether or not you're impressed by 3D games is not really relevant to a review of a 3D accelerated video card. You comment is nice, but it's a bit like discussing the merits of driving vs. walking in response to a review of a car. If you don't like driving, that's nice, but it has nothing to do with the relative merits of the car vs. other cars.

This is a review of a 3D accelerated video card. It is designed to render 3D games, so reviewing it with respect to how well it does that job is really the only useful way to discuss it.

I have no comment on your ideas about the merits of 3D gaming. I happen to enjoy 3D games a great deal. I also like chocolate and I don't like cheese. What of it?

Linux drivers are already out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux drivers for these cards are already out.

Cooling?

[Penguinoflight]

Get radeon. Yeah, I might get flamed, but they're the best for no heat. I get better stability than I did with a rage pro, and it needs no fan. The newer radeon windows drivers are good, and there's OSS drivers. Now if only the kernel dev team could fix the MVP3 agpgart bug (motherboard).

Re:I'm shocked...don't you know what framerate rea

[Anonymous Coward]

...AND you will notice any changes in framerate.

A game locked at 30 fps is far better than a game
that constantly jumps around from 10 to 110 fps.

Find the minimum framefrate for your game with
vblank sync off and lock your refresh rate to a
multiple of that with vblank sync on.

e.g. if your minimum is rate is 36 fps then run
your monitor at 72 Hz and have vblank sync on.
Hopefully your game will lock at 36 fps and stay
there.

If it keeps jumping back and forth between 36 and
72 then beg your game developer to allow you to
set a max framerate.

matrox vs nvidia

[artemb]

Sure, Quattro4 beats old good matrox in performance and would probably beat it in the quality department on the *second* display.

But! The problem with Nvidia cards (as well as with Radeons) is that right between high-speed RAMDAC and your trusty high-end monitor thay put a low-pass filter that smoothes the high-quality signal (i.e. with sharp edges, hence with a lot of high-frequency harmonics) that RAMDAC generates. What you see on the screen is *slightly* fuzzy image. The problem is that it has to be sharp. In my experience matrox G400MAX gives the best picture quality. G450 is similar, but it's a bit slower. G550 is a bit faster but it's RAMDAC is on an add-on board and that slightly degrades signal quality.

I tried Radeon with it's 350MHz ramdac which, according to some reviews supposed to beat nvidia in image quality. Yuck! I've plugged my g400max back 20 minutes later because I couldn't stand that annoyingly fuzzy (compared to matrox) picture radeon produced.

Once in a while I give new cards a chance to replace my old matrox, but so far g400 bets everyone in quality department on primary monitor. Maybe I shall try 200nvs.

i might sound old-fashioned but..

[unk1911]

.. i still find 2-d games like chess and pac-man more entertaining than the latest 3-d extravaganza of the day. these 3-d games have not really evolved much in terms of originality. they all fall into the same old categories: shoot-em up, role-playing, fighter, strategy, etc. why can't somebody come up with an entirely new concept.

i remember back in the early 1990's there was this cool VR game called alphaworld or something like that, it was a totally abstract game where you flew this abstract ship around in the universe of rooms connected by little doorways, sorta reminds me of the movie "the cube" if anyone's seen it.

or that other game, the "incredible machine", how fun was that?

we need more games like that. , instead we get quake 7. where's the innovation in the gaming world? sure they are making the games look better, more realistic, shinier, but i these games are just clones of games we've already played... give me something original to play, or give me death, damnit

just my 2 cents.

What I like about nvnews

[billcopc]

The most fascinating part about NVNews is that they're such whores, practically begging shops left and right for free toys in exchange for a very unskilled and unprofessional review that feels like it was written by a 15 year old. Never underestimate the damaging potential of a bunch of imbeciles with money.

Re:What I like about nvnews

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the comments Bill. And be sure to visit us every day so I can make more money!

Re:What I like about nvnews

[billcopc]

Bah.. I'd rather keep harassing Deals until they stock that friggin' IRMan. I guess NVNews doesn't suck nearly as much as MaxReboot though :)

Shoot the moderators!

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the above post did not deserve ANY moderation... but to waste a "-1" "Flamebait" is just total bullshit.

Not to mention it doesn't even conform to the definition of "flamebait", which *I* would define as "a confrontational retort which invites a hostile response.".

The above would more likely have fit in as a "Troll" moderation, except the author appeared sincere and on-topic.

I two think it's completely lame to benchmark a $200 card in a PC with $80 worth of memory. And I'm WAY behind the performance curve... brand new Athlong 1900XP, old hard drives, Voodoo3 3000...

...but I had the common sense to plunk down for a 512MB DIMM.

Re:I'm shocked...don't you know what framerate rea

[Render]

Of course, a game that runs poorly isn't going to produce flicker. Your monitor will happily keep chugging away at 75 Hz, or whatever your refresh rate is, no matter how often your graphics card updates the display buffer.

You forgot probably the best reason of all to have framerates about 24 FPS: Persistence of Vision.

The real world is updated continuously. Its framerate is infinite. That the infinite framerate of the real world looks better than a game running at 24 FPS is such a no brainer that I cannot believe anyone would take the position that anything over 24 FPS is superfluous. Even if the eye does not update faster than 24 FPS, because of persistence of vision, objects in motion appear blurred.

Movies look good even with their low framerate because of motion blur; when they are filmed, the camera shutter is left open for a small period of time each frame to capture the motion of objects during that frame, instead of just taking an instant static picture of the state of the world at the beginning of the frame and then not capturing information until 1/24 of a second later.

When a game has a higher framerate, even though your eye may not update your brain with the image of every single frame, it keeps recording what it sees. Your brain gets updated with a composite, motion-blurred image. To you, the user, it doesn't look like motion blur. Your brain interprets the motion blur as more fluid movement. And that's as it should be.

(Really, all you have to do is *look* at a game running at 24 FPS and 60 FPS and you'll see a difference. You can argue forever that the eye can't update the brain more at more than 24 FPS, but all those arguments amount to nothing next the solid evidence of actually seeing a game running at a high framerate.)

Better yet

[ThunderBucket]

Granted I've got a dual 1.2GHz Athlon, but the video is a GeForce 1 DDR. Dungeon Siege runs fine. There's no video bottleneck that I've seen so far.