NVIDIA GeForce4 - NV17 and NV25 Come to Life

Final Words

The past couple of launches from NVIDIA have been of products that have never really surpassed their predecessors by more than 10 - 20% initially. The gaps eventually extended beyond that but never has an NVIDIA launch been as exciting from a pure performance standpoint as today's launch of the GeForce4. Many situations placed the GeForce4 Ti 4600 anywhere from 20% to over 50% faster than the GeForce3 Ti 500, and that's without even turning on anti-aliasing.

The GeForce4 is not only capable of quite a bit in today's games but it will be a serious contender in titles that will be hitting the streets in the coming months before the end of the year. The improvements to the architecture of the GeForce3 have definitely given the GeForce4 a decent boost in performance, and coupled with more efficient management of die space (removing some portions of the die, optimizing others) NVIDIA is sitting on a very impressive GPU.

The GeForce4 is easily the crowned victor of the Unreal Performance Test 2002, at least for the next few months; it's featureset is made complete by improved AA performance and nView.

As a multi-monitor solution, nView is excellent; it is everything ATI's Hydravision is, and it's even easier to use. The fact that NVIDIA is integrated nView in all of their cards indicates their belief in the technology and it actually is a very useful technology that can greatly improve productivity.

We can't feel more than a little disappointed by the GeForce4 MX however. The $99 GeForce4 MX 420 will be a good replacement for the current GeForce2 MX, and the $149 GeForce4 MX 440 may be justifyable but the $179 MX 460 makes very little sense to us. Even the 440 could use some more justification in order for it to make perfect sense to the user that does care about gaming. Our recommendation is to stay away from the MX 460 and wait a few more weeks for the GeForce4 Ti 4200; pay the extra $20 and gain full DirectX 8 pixel and vertex shader support as well as two additional rendering pipelines.

The GeForce4 Ti 4200 is the perfect example of a product that would have never seen the light of day had it not been for competition from ATI, which clearly reiterates the point that competition definitely helps an industry, especially when it's competition between two capable firms such as ATI and NVIDIA.

ATI will not have anything spectacular to respond to the GeForce4 with immediately, however they are very confident that their next part will be improved in every way imaginable and thus very impressive. The usual complaint about drivers is the first thing that comes up whenever the words ATI and potential are used in the same sentence but from what we're hearing from developers, it seems as if ATI is much more responsive now to driver problems than they've ever been in the past.

For now, the GeForce4 has been the first NVIDIA GPU in recent history to hit the market in such an impressive fashion. The GeForce3 was exciting but it offered limited performance gains; the Ti 500 gave us another performance boost but nothing too impressive. The GeForce4 however is not only improved architecturally but its raw power boost translates into some serious performance gains even today, not to mention all of the feature improvements such as accuview AA and nView multimonitor support.

From the standpoint of the competition, ATI seems relatively unimpressed with the GeForce4's specifications from what we've heard. Whether or not this means that the supposed R300 core is just that much better is up for speculation...