Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
...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?
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
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.