GeForce - Generations

The one thing you have to understand is that demand is extremely high for any GeForce 4 at this time. I don't even think the 4200 or 4400 have been released for sale yet here either, so that might be your big problem. I would wait at least another month and see what happens. I believe the 4200's are going to start shipping sometime in April so the price should start coming down in yours and my market as well.

Your best bet if you don't want to spend alot of money would be a GeForce 3 Ti200 at 200 dollars right now, or wait a month or two and get a GeForce 4 4200 for around the same price.

Computing and computer hardware are both constantly evolving. Therefore there is always going to be something bigger and better around the corner. Something I say quite a lot is that if we all sat around waiting for the next best thing no one would buy anything. ATI and Nvidia are almost neck and neck with technological advances.

If it wasn't for Nvidia bringing out the overclocked GF3 ti500 just to stop ATI having the performance crown for any length of time we may have seen ATI hold that position until the recently released GF4 came out. This may have swayed people opinions of the Canadian company somewhat. I haven't heard anything about ATIs next product but they seem to be matching Nvidia step by step. Nvidia power the Xbox, ATI Power the GameCube, Nvidia release an integrated chipset for motherboards, ATI release an integrated chipset for motherboards, ATI release mobile 7500, Nvidia release GF4Go...
I wouldn't say that ATI is that much in the background, sure Nvidia have the gaming worlds attention at the moment but the moment that ATI come out with a superior product and their driver support has been proven to have improved since the early radeon days then I'll be all over it like a rash.

Most advances in the last few years has been bandwidth and clock speeds resulting in the ability to render more polygons per second than previous generations. The first step away from this seems to have been the Geforce3 which toted the nfiniteFX Engine where programmers could use the power of the GF3 GPU to do completely new and exciting effects and pixel and vertex shading. Although there has not really been a decent number of games using this technology (DirectX > 8.0) this has been the first change of focus that I have seen for sometime. With GF4 there have been even greater advances in antialiasing meaning that jagged edges can be smoothed out without the massive drops in frame rates. ATI have also been implementing other technologies such as TrueForm (making 3d objects more curved and less blocky) and their own improved antialiasing. This means that not only are we getting more frames per second (and we can't really see that much difference with them greater than 30) but the companies are now focusing on image quality. Hopefully the next releases from both ATI, Nvidia and the other smaller companies will remain focused on improving image quality

as Cheetah mentioned my post
> Audio and Video > The GeForce4 Family
http://www.3dspotlight.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=945

Geforce4 Ti 4600
300 MHz core
325 MHz memory clock (DDR Sdram)
Retail $400

GeForce4 Ti 4400
300MHz core
275MHz clock
Retail $300

GeForce4 Ti 4200
275MHz core
250MHz clock
Retail $200

Three models of the MX will be available, retailing from $99 -to- $179.

MX 460
300MHz core
MX 440
270MHz core
MX 420
250MHz core

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But I agree about image quality, which is why I still use the Voodoo5. It's hard to make time stand still, but it's easier to buy another vid-card (new or used) to improve your system rather than a whole new console w/ all those games included.

Unfortunately the consumers buzzword is speed; whether w/ cpu's or vid-cards. Hopefully one of these manufacturers will finally say, "Enough!" Quality, stability & good drivers @ reasonable prices, but I doubt it will happen soon. Just on this board alone look @ all the people who want to overclock. Obsessed w/ speed.

HardOCP had a bit up yesterday about it;

"A couple of websites are kicking it around that there will be no GeForce5, and from what the CEO of NVIDIA told us at the GeForce4 launch party, that is absolutely correct. Not only is the GeForce namesake going bye-bye, so is the technology. Don't expect to be losing anything, but rather picking up more as I think we will see technologies from 3dfx employed in the NV30 chipset. No doubt that while 3dfx was a struggling company, they had engineers that we not only seeing outside the box, but also down the street and around the corner."

Long live 3dfx!!! I really hope that the NV30 implements 3dfx FSAA and image quality. Then, Nvidia will come in and add some speed and you got a whole new generations of video cards...

Wishful thinking..

Originally posted by Arris
With GF4 there have been even greater advances in antialiasing meaning that jagged edges can be smoothed out without the massive drops in frame rates.

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GeForce 4 Anti-Aliasing is a bit of a joke, at least mode/implementation wise. I've yet to test my GeForce 4 4400 performance wise in this respect, but mode wise there are ZERO differences & 4xS is 4 Sample + 9 Tap in NVmax, which GeForce 3 can already do also.

The main thing which bugs me is DXT1 support. Honestly, basically zero other reviewers out there both to mention that its broken & newer games simply disable NVIDIA DXT1 because its so poor.

Tom, have you tired NVmax with the new 28.32 detonators?

Originally posted by svtcobra
Tom, have you tired NVmax with the new 28.32 detonators?

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yup.

and your results?

Originally posted by 3DSThomas

GeForce 4 Anti-Aliasing is a bit of a joke, at least mode/implementation wise. I've yet to test my GeForce 4 4400 performance wise in this respect, but mode wise there are ZERO differences & 4xS is 4 Sample + 9 Tap in NVmax, which GeForce 3 can already do also.

The main thing which bugs me is DXT1 support. Honestly, basically zero other reviewers out there both to mention that its broken & newer games simply disable NVIDIA DXT1 because its so poor.

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Yes I just meant it didn't incurr such a great performance hit.
I don't mean there AA looks any better than the GF3.

Originally posted by svtcobra
and your results?

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Seems to work just fine. Something I think might be up with Anistropic filtering option though, not sure.