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

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.

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?