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Posted by
Julio
Franco on April 15, 2002
Manufacturer: Visiontek
Products: Xtasy
GeForce4 Ti4600
- Xtasy
GeForce4 Ti4400
Check
for Xtasy
Ti4600 or Ti4400
prices.
Ok, so you pay all that money and you
get what? I hear you… you want to know what are these new
toys capable of.
While this is our first real review on a
GeForce 4 Ti board (yes, what a shame – many more in the works
anyway ;)), I thought it would be good idea to briefly
explain what NVIDIA has packed on their newest video chip.
While most of these features are now available on hardware,
they will hardly get implemented on current games but
next-generation ones, not the case of all new features on
the GeForce 4, as some of them don’t rely on its
implementation and can be used right away.
An updated feature from the original
GeForce 3, according to NVIDIA performance has been
increased as much as three times from the previous chip. The
chip now boosts among other features dual programmable
Vertex Shaders (versus one on the GF3) and more advanced
Pixel Shader Pipelines. While implementation of these
features still have to be seen on games, NVIDIA has released
a couple technology demos that better explain what can be
achieved, on their white paper they gave an example: “how
to render realistic hair and fur?”
Individual hairs react to the light based on orientation
of the light and structure of hair. This occurs on a
per-pixel basis.
Here’s the concept behind Accuview AA
directly from NVIDIA’s white paper: “The
Accuview engine improves upon NVIDIA’s multisampling
technology by providing a variety of multisampling modes.
These modes include 2x, 4x, Quincunx, and a new 4XS mode
that delivers improved subpixel coverage better texture
quality. In addition, Accuview incorporates anisotropic
filtering for more detailed images, and a patent-pending
pipeline to increase overall performance.”
So, according to NVIDIA their new
implementation of anti-aliasing should reduce performance
loss when enabling it. Of course, we couldn’t
get leave you without some real world testing and for that
same reason we tested the new Ti4600 head to head to the
older GF3 Ti500 using all the anti-aliasing modes available,
the important factor there will be the reduced performance
loss, you can jump to our benchmark results here for seeing
such results.
In the meantime, I will concentrate on
visual quality, especially on the newly introduced 4xS mode
which IMHO is the best AA implementation I’ve seen so far
on a NVIDIA board. While all the hype was behind NVIDIA’s
Quincunx mode a while ago, that’s definitely two blurry
for my taste, leaving me with the same original 2x and 4x
options. The new 4xS mode adds much more detail to the
textures being anti-aliased which results in a jaggy-less,
non blurry image.
In this example you can clearly see the
quality difference between 4x AA and 4xS AA. The price of
the higher quality still has to be seen, but so far, I’m
sold =).
I decided to give 4xS a go by myself,
here is a quality sample I took from one of the few
tennis games available for the PC, Tennis Masters Series by
Microids:
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