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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.
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
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?
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 $$$
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
...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 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.