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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on May 15, 2002
Manufacturer: Creative Product:
3D
Blaster GeForce4 Ti4400
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videocards prices.
As
with every other GeForce graphics card before it, the
GeForce 4 Ti also supports both DXTC & S3TC in Direct3D
and OpenGL respectively. As before, DXT1 also suffers from
the same… quality compromise, that being that 16-Bit
interpolation is used for DXT1 as compared to 32-Bit on
other Graphics cards, e.g. Kyro. DXT2-5 are unaffected by
this however & works just the same as on other Graphics
cards – Microsoft specified the interpolation to be used
for DXT2-5, though not DXT1. There’s a more detailed look
at this over at Gamebasement.
An
OpenGL only workaround does exist to this however, as
available in RivaTuner.
Ticking
Enable S3TC quality trick allows DXT1 requests to be
changed to DXT3, which will basically overcome the DXT1
image quality loss, though offers a lower compression ratio
than DXT3.
As
NVIDIA have pointed out though previously - So by way of
summary… yes, the problem with artefacts when using DXT1
does exists in certain cases but for 99.9% of people it will
not affect their enjoyment of the product. I have yet to see
an example other than the sky texture in Quake3 that
illustrates this problem and that combined with the fact
that developers are not using DXT1 for future titles means
that going forward this issue will disappear (it is worth
noting that even games written using the Quake3 engine do
not have this problem since their developers switched the
compression method).
Personally
though I don’t feel that something not being commonly used
means you should skimp on it & perhaps if what are
essentially the most popular Gamers graphics cards around
provided better quality DXT1 then it would be used
more commonly. It’s worth noting that Westwood’s Command
& Conquer: Renegade automatically disables DXT1
support on GeForce cards only.
The Creative GeForce 4 Ti 4400 also supports
NVIDIA’s nView multi-display technology. The Creative card
features DVI, CRT & S-Video outputs (1 of each) – with
a convenient adapter cable for the S-Video output (Contains
regular S-Video output & Composite output), though
semi-disappointingly there’s no DVI to CRT adapter
provided – which would easily enable you to connect to
dual CRT Monitors, as opposed to 1 CRT & 1 LCD Monitor
(&/or TV). nView provides a great amount of control over
how the Graphics card deals with these multiple-displays.
Using various different applets it provides
you can adjust things like TV format output, display timings
and so on. Another nice touch to the package for sure =).
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