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

Good stuff

[MoiTominator]

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

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: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. :)

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

[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

Is this so special?

[Gerb]

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

Gerb

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: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: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.

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.