The Gainward GF4 PowerPack! Ultra/750XP Golden Sample!
An Awesome Card With an Insane Bundle...

By - Marco Chiappetta
June 20, 2002 

"IN-GAME" IMAGE QUALITY COMPARISON:

We took some screen captures from within Quake III, with all of the "in-game" options set to the exact same levels. We set the resolution to 1024x768, maxed out the texture and geometry sliders, set the color depth and textures to 32-Bit and enabled tri-linear filtering.

On the Gainward GeForce 4 Ti, we enabled 4X AA and set the Anisotropic filtering level to the maximum setting of "8X" on the OpenGL tab in NVIDIA's reference drivers.  With the ATi Radeon 8500, we enabled 4X "Quality Mode" AA, and set the Anisotropic filtering level to the maximum, "16X", in the ATi driver panel.  The screen shots appear to be very similar, but personally I think the GeForce 4 produces a slightly better image. The floor seems to be more detailed and the textures around the torches look a bit sharper.  ATi's AA method seems just a slightly more effective to us though.  The difference is most visible in the steps and around the windows.  If you have trouble seeing a difference, keep in mind these are compressed JPEGs, so these is some loss in quality.  In a fast shooter, seeing these minor difference would be almost impossible.

Our Test System Pentium 4 / i845 / DDR SDRAM Platform

 
Common Hardware:

Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz. (2200MHz.) Processor

Abit IT7 (i845 DDR) S478 Pentium 4 Motherboard

256MB of Crucial DDR SDRAM

IBM DTLA307030 30GB. ATA/100 7200RPM HD

On-Board Sound

Windows XP Professional with Direct X 8.1

Intel chipset drivers, version 4.00

Video Cards:

Gainward GeForce4 PowerPack! Ultra/750XP TV/VIVO Golden Sample (128MB DDR)

ATI Radeon 8500LE (128MB DDR)

Driver Revisions:

NVIDIA Detonator 4 Reference drivers, v.28.32

ATI Reference drivers, v7.70
 

DirectX 8 - Remedy's Max Payne & MadOnion's 3DMark 2001 You Payne?

 
For the remainder of this review, we'll be comparing the performance of Gainward's GF4 Ti Ultra / 750 XP (at default clockspeeds) to a 128MB ATi Radeon 8500LE. This particular  Radeon 8500LE retails for a far lower price than the Gainward card though. Keep that in mind as you compare the performance differences between these two cards.  Whether or not the investment in a high-end card like this is worth it, is ultimately up to you, the consumer.

The first test we ran was with Remedy's Max Payne.  We used 3DCenter's mod to benchmark the game at a few resolutions. All of the in-game options were set to high quality, and Anisotropic filtering was enabled in the game's control panel.

MAX PAYNE:

As you can see, the Gainward card was faster than the Radeon at every resolution. Even when set to 1600x1200, the Ultra 750 / XP outpaced the Radeon at 1024X768!  This benchmark / mod isn't conducive to high frame rates, so the numbers themselves may not impress you all that much.  Nonetheless the Ultra 750 / XP's performance was very good in this test.

MADONION 3DMARK 2001 SE:

We saw similar results with MadOnion's 3D Mark 2001 SE.  Breaking a score of 11000 without tweaking the card in any way is a testament to the speed of the GF4 Ti 4600 GPU powering the Gainward card.  We'll move on to something a little more taxing next.  It's time to enable Anti-Aliasing and see what happens to the performance!

 

AA 3DMark Scores and Some Quake 3...