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Introduction
It's
a pretty interesting battle right now at the video
card arena and there are currently three main
competitors: NVIDIA, ATi and Matrox. NVIDIA's
top products are the GeForce4 Ti 4400 and Ti 4600,
the difference only being in their clock speeds.
NVIDIA's original intention was to let the GeForce4
MX series become their mainstream and value card
but after some negative reviews, NVIDIA was pretty
much pushed to release a sort of low end GeForce4
Ti and thus was born the GeForce4 Ti 4200. It's
basically a Sub-$200 card that has DX8.1 features
and is meant to take care of its competiors at
that segment.
The
GeForce4 Ti Chip
Not
much has really changed when it comes to the GeForce3
to the GeForce4 Ti series. Note that the Ti needs
to be stressed for the GeForce4 because there
is a very big difference in the features of the
GeForce4 MX against the GeForce4 Ti. The basic
improvements and changes from the GeForce3 to
the GeForce4 Ti lie in a new memory architecture,
improved Anti-Aliasing, an improved nfiniteFX
engine (called nfiniteFX II) and better multi-monitor
support.
As
stated earlier, the main difference between the
members of the GeForce4 Ti family lie in their
clock speeds and video memory. The GeForce4 Ti
4600 being the top model has the highest core
and memory clock, followed by the Ti 4400; both
of them only come in 128MB variants while the
Ti 4200 comes in two flavors: a 128MB variant
and a 64MB variant.
Basic
Improvements
nfiniteFX
II Engine
It incorporates dual programmable Vertex Shaders,
faster Pixel Shaders and 3D Textures into the
GeForce4 Ti chip. It's basically the same thing
as the first nfiniteFX engine but this one gives
a speed improvement.
Accuview
Antialiasing
Compared
to supersampling, multisampling offers a better
overall FSAA experience. Its performance hit isn't
as big and it basically offers better visual quality.
Makes a lot of sense: less performance loss, better
visual quality.
Lightspeed
Memory Architecture II (LMA II)
LMA
II boosts effective memory bandwidth by up to
300%. Radical new technologies including Z-occlusion
culling, fast Z-clear, and auto pre-charge effectively
multiply the memory bandwidth to ensure fluid
frame rates for the latest 3D and 2D games and
applications.
To
sum it up, it can be said that the GeForce4 Ti
series is basically a faster GeForce3. NView was
basically left out in the Ti series and basically
left it to the MX series. With the improvements
in the engine and the memory controller, another
significant speed improvement is expected in the
new GeForce4 Ti cards.
The
Card, Test System |
