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IMAGE
QUALITY:
We're not going to include a
slew of in-game screen shots in this review,
Davo already took care of that in his initial review of
NVIDIA's reference GeForce 4 Ti 4600 and GeForce 4 MX460.
Unless there is a problem (or enhancement) with their
particular card, there shouldn't be any variation in image
quality from one manufacturer's GeForce 4 to the next.
However, there will be variations from one chipset to the
next...
GEFORCE4 TI
RADEON 8500
(SET YOUR DESKTOP TO 32-BIT
COLOR TO AVOID BANDING WHEN LOOKING AT THESE IMAGES)
We took two
in-game screenshots in Quake 3 Arena at 32-Bit color with 64-Tap
anisotropic filtering enabled on our Visiontek GeForce 4
Ti 4600, and on an ATi Radeon 8500LE with Quake 3 set to
the exact same graphical options. Granted, Quake 3
isn't exactly the best game to showcase vibrant colors,
but I'm sure you'll agree that at first glance both cards
appear to render this scene almost exactly. But there is
a subtle difference, that gives a slight image quality
edge to the Radeon. Look closely at the floor
near the far wall, to the left of the portal. Notice
how the Radeon doesn't blur the textures quite as much as
the GeForce 4 does. It is very subtle, but the
Radeon definitely seems to do a better job. We'll
leave it up to you to decide whether or not the difference
is dramatic enough to hinder your overall gaming
experience though.
While we're on the subject of
image quality, we'd like to quickly talk about the
Visiontek GeForce 4 Ti 4600's 2D output. NVIDIA has
taken flak recently because their 2D output isn't on par
with ATi or Matrox, but things seem to have been improved
with the GeForce 4. Side by side with the Radeon, I
could not see any differences all the way to 1600x1200. OK, enough of my blabbering! What
do you say we get on with the benchmarks?
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Our Test System |
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Pentium 4 / i845 /
DDR SDRAM Platform |
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Common Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz.
(2200MHz.)
Processor
ECS P4IBAD (i845 DDR) S478 Pentium 4
Motherboard
256MB of Crucial DDR SDRAM
IBM DTLA307030 30GB. ATA/100
7200RPM HD
On-Board PC-97 Sound
Windows XP Professional
with Direct X 8.1
Intel chipset drivers,
version 3.20
Video
Cards:
Visiontek GeForce 4 Ti 4600
(128MB DDR) - 300MHz. Core / 650MHz Memory
ATI Radeon 8500LE (128MB
DDR) - 250MHz. Core / 460MHz. Memory
Driver
Revisions:
NVIDIA Detonator 4
Reference drivers, v.27.50
ATI Reference drivers,
v7.67
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DirectX 8 - Remedy's Max Payne & MadOnion's
3DMark 2001 |
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You Payne? |
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