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."
Good review. Detailed and uses several pretty new games to benchmark, instead of relying on the old Q3 tests.
I was looking forward to uncovering these features of the GeForce4 Ti 4200 myself. Now you've spoiled everything.
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.
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?
Glenn
The Smrt way to trade CFDs on the ASX
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Nice one, heh heh, you just spoiled it for everyone who was psychic enough to block stories by chrisd in advance. ;)
graspee
Now, finally, a memory upgrade and a visible performance improvement.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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!"
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
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.
Tom's hardware already reviewed this card on April the 9th. You can find it here.
Gerb
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
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.
If you want some more information, here's some good reviews/articles I saw today during my daily browsing:
Compare these numbers against Nvidia's previous attempt at the budget arena, the MX 440 here. A much needed improvement!
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
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.
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
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.
The future isn't what it used to be.
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.
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
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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
Coming soon - pyrogyra
...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
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.
Get off my launchpad!
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 !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
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 read the internet for the articles.
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.
What?
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.
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?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Hm, you really are dumb.
It displays it twice.
Pal is at 50 Hz.
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?
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.
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.
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..