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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on May 15, 2002
Manufacturer: Creative Product:
3D
Blaster GeForce4 Ti4400
Search
for 3d
videocards prices.
Stability
wise the GeForce 4 Ti was great and I can’t say I
experienced any problems with Applications/Games crashing
due to the Drivers or overheating, or anything remotely
Graphics card related. NVIDIA really have come a long way
over the past few years & even the likes of John Carmack
(Who just about everyone seems to listen to, hence the
quoting) said the following earlier this year;
NVIDIA’s
OpenGL drivers are my "gold standard", & it
has been quite a while since I have had to report a problem
to them, & even their brand new extensions work as
documented the first time I try them. When I have a problem
on an NVIDIA, I assume that it is my fault. With anyone
else's drivers, I assume it is their fault. This has turned
out correct almost all the time. I have heard more anecdotal
reports of instability on some systems with NVIDIA drivers
recently, but I track stability separately from correctness,
because it can be influenced by so many outside factors.
2D
quality was similarly rather good & didn’t cause me
any problems to be honest. Though according to The Inquirer
this is to be further improved upon in the NV30, where
NVIDIA will get strict on component quality – something
which previously had been a bit lacking and was a source of
a lot of 2D image quality problems with earlier cards.
As
mentioned earlier, The Creative GeForce 4 Ti doesn’t
include a software DVD decoder, rather you’ll want to use
one purchased by yourself, or one that came bundled with
some other hardware you own. Feature support wise if you
have PowerDVD XP 4 you’ll want to install this patch,
which - provides support for the most recent devices on
the market, such as ATI TwinView & NVIDIA NV17/NV 25
chips. Without this patch installed you’ll receive
this error should you try to enable Hardware
Acceleration for playback.
To test DVD performance I first ran PowerDVD
XP, with Audio mode set to S/PDIF Output (To Allow
the Audigy Drivers to decode AC-3 for 5.1 output).
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Hardware
Enabled
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Hardware
Disabled
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As you can see the MPEG decoding features of
the GeForce 4 Ti greatly enhance performance in PowerDVD XP
4, offer a good reduction in CPU use. Next up I tested
Intervideo WinDVD 4, with Audio mode set to 4 Channel
output.
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Hardware
Enabled
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Hardware
Disabled
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WinDVD
4 shows very little performance difference with regards to
MPEG decoding features available in comparison to PowerDVD
XP 4.
Image quality wise WinDVD 4 looks absolutely great in
combination with the GeForce 4 Ti.
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