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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on May 15, 2002
Manufacturer: Creative Product:
3D
Blaster GeForce4 Ti4400
Search
for 3d
videocards prices.
 While
the
US
crowd
hasn’t seen Creative branded videocards for a long time,
the European market have steadily had their dose of 3D
Blasters in the last couple of years. Although this might
change in the not so distant future with Creative’s recent
acquisition of 3DLabs, that’s not what we will be
discussing today.
In
case it wasn’t too obvious, the Creative 3DBlaster Ti4400
is based on NVIDIA’s latest GeForce4 chip. The Ti4400
variant can be considered the middle between the hardcore
high-end Ti4600, and the more mainstream Ti4200 chip and
while the later hasn’t been released just yet, it should
be available in the next couple of weeks, completing the GF4
Ti chip family.
Usually
considered "the sweet spot" for an enthusiast
card, most Ti4400 boards offer all the fancy and speedy
factor of the more expensive 4600 Titanium's but at a lower
price... read on to see how the 3D Blaster performs.
Additionally you can read a head to head comparison between Ti4600
& 4400 boards here.
Taking
a look at the board itself reminded me of the 3dfx Voodoo 5
5500 card I used to have a while ago. It makes me wonder
what previous owners of the 3dfx board have to say, usually
mocking of the size of Voodoo boards; the Ti4400 is an
equally massive card with some rather large capacitors.
Fitting the graphics card into the AGP slot of the Abit
NV7-133R was a bit unnerving given the rather awkward
layout of that board (not that that length of this card
helped in any way), though eventually went in smoothly
enough.
Bundle
wise Creative offers you Incoming Forces & e-Racer, both
from Rage Software; that
plus the obligatory drivers and NVIDIA demo CD. A software
DVD decoder is not included – a common bundle these days
found in most graphics cards distributed on the
US
and even in a few soundcards. This will
probably help keeping the price down anyway, and that’s
what people will care about the most, right?
The
manual that comes with the Creative GeForce 4 Ti 4400 is
actually a rather basic Quickstart guide that covers
installation of the hardware. Creative seemingly have moved
on from the tomes that used to come with earlier products
like their Live! soundcards, for example.
Some
of the more important features of the GeForce 4 Ti are Lightspeed
Memory Architecture II, nfiniteFX II & Accuview
Anti-Aliasing, which I’ll cover in more detail now.
Lightspeed
Memory Architecture II
As
you can guess by the name, LMA 2 is an updated version of
LMA, as featured in the GeForce 3. LMA 1/2 both work to
reduce memory bandwidth requirements, which will improve
performance by reducing redundant processing and providing
other architectural improvements. The ATI Radeon &
PowerVR Kyro Graphics cards feature similarly themed
technologies – reduce redundant processing, save
bandwidth, improve performance. It does this in several
ways:
-
Crossbar memory controller. Compared
to the GeForce 4 MX, the GeForce 4 Ti uses 4 Crossbar
memory controllers, as opposed to 2. This provides a
more efficient way of accessing the frame buffer as
compared with traditional memory controllers. The net
effect being that it optimises bandwidth use for
improved performance. No application support is required
for this. It’s worth noting that the nForce chipset
also utilizes (2) Crossbar memory controllers.
-
Loseless Z-Compression. The Z-Buffer
contains depth information for every single pixel to be
rendered by the Graphics card. Thus using higher
resolutions not only consume more fill rate, they also
require a larger Z-Buffer as more pixels will be
rendered. The GeForce 4 on-board hardware compression of
Z-Buffer data. Most critically it is loseless, so there
will be no precision loss which could adversely affect
the image. According to NVIDIA this hardware compression
will reduce the Z-Buffer requirements about 25%. Once
again, this saves memory bandwidth. No application
support is required for this.
-
Z-Occlusion Culling. Traditionally
Graphics cards have performed a lot of redundant
rendering by rendering pixels that will inevitably not
be visible. This redundant rendering is known as
overdraw. The level of overdraw can vary from title to
title with some having an overdraw level of 3 or more,
while others are much lower. Reportedly ID Software Game
engines are excellent in this area. Though clearly with
Games getting more & more visually complex the level
of overdraw is not about to decrease of its own accord.
While many Developers have added in their own software
methods to reduce overdraw others will need to rely on
that provided in Graphics cards themselves, if any, e.g.
PowerVR Kyro cards use a Tile-based deferred rendering
system which is excellent at eliminating overdraw &
are perhaps the most efficient consumer Graphics cards
around.
-
The
first part of this process is the Depth test - Z-Buffer
values are compared to determine what is visible in a
scene, i.e. pixels at the front of a scene will obscure
pixels with a greater depth, i.e. behind them. For
example, if your viewpoint is looking at a solid wall,
then any pixels behind that wall won't be visible
through it. As such any non-visible scene elements are
completely disregarded, only visible elements get sent
on to the Framebuffer.
The second is the Occlusion Query. This tests
whether triangles are hidden completely behind other
triangles. As before, non-visible triangles are
disregarded & play no further part in the rendering
process. Z-Occlusion Culling,
unlike the other LMA II features does however require
Application support & will only work with Front to
back order rendering applications.
-
Auto Pre-Charge. This minimizes
the latency issues involved with accessing a different
area of memory. No application support is required for
this.
-
Fast
Z-Clear.
Fairly self-explanatory this one. This minimizes
the amount of bandwidth & time needed to clear
Z-Buffer data which will also improve performance
further. No application support is required for this.
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