September 2002 3Digest -
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti VX 64MB 5.5 ns

This chip is presented by Gainward GeForce2 Ti/500 XP Golden Sample 64MB, AGP videocard.

Features:

• NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti chip, clock rate lowered to 225 MHz;
• 64MB DDR SDRAM memory in eight Hynix 4ns microchips, clock rate reduced to 183 (366) MHz, 128-bit bus;
• Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 900 megapixels/sec and 1800 megatexels/sec.

GeForce2 GTS was released in the spring of the year 2000, causing the squall of criticism due to relatively slow 166 MHz DDR memory already used in GeForce256. The GPU itself was considerably improved (one more texture module per pipeline, increased 200 MHz clock rate), but the memory bandwidth was insufficient. The fall of the same year brought the improved version of GeForce2 GTS called GeForce2 Pro. It differed from its brother with the faster 200 MHz memory. Certainly, the 32-bit color perfomance was significantly improved, but still 200 (400) MHz was not enough to show the full potential.

But the development of GeForce2 line was abruptly stopped after the release of GeForce3 with the strong memory optimization and without such a high RAM bandwidth requirement. GeForce2 Pro was finished with the release of GeForce2 Ti, putting the end of GeForce2 family. These cards currently get cheaper and cheaper, already costing less than $100. Moreover, the release of GeForce4 MX is called to finish the remnants of GeForce2 off. However there is still such a huge amount of these cards - both GeForce2 Pro, and GeForce2 Ti. And also "waste" cards - GeForce2 Ti VX maintaining only reduced 225 MHz clock rate. They'll remain in the market for some time, but as GeForce2 Ti production is cancelled, there is no waste for these chips, so they are bound to leave for good soon.

Wasn't overclocked.

On the 10th of September 2002 the latest drivers from NVIDIA are 30.20, 31.00, 40.41 for Windows XP. Test results are in the summary diagrams. You can get more information about problems users face with various NVIDIA drivers at NVIDIA World website.

And now I want to attract your attention to another important 3D feature - filtering. As many of you know, all chipsets support bilinear filtering that is an important instrument in MIP-mapping, some chipsets support trilinear filtering (true, not the approximation) and only few support anisotropic filtering.

Due to the fact that GeForce2 and GeForce3 do support anisotropic filtering, I recommend you to pay attention to the article concerning this feature.

You can compare screenshots with reference ones (NVIDIA GeForce3).

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22	23	24
NVIDIA GeForce2						-		-		-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26	27	28	29	30
NVIDIA GeForce2
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list: 1. Return to Castle Wolfenstein 2. Unreal2 (alpha version) 3. Comanche4 4. Jedi Knight II Outcast 5. Morrowind 6. Colin McRAE Rally2 7. Red Faction 8. Rally Trophy 9. Sacrifice 10. Venom 11. Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO 12. Real MYST 13. Blade of Darkness 14. Neverwinter Nights 15. 3DMark2001: Game1 16. 3DMark2001: Game2 17. 3DMark2001: Game3 18. 3DMark2001: Game4 19. 3DMark2001: Dot3 20. 3DMark2001: EMBM 21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders 22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders 23. Warcraft III 24. Soldier of Fortune II 25. Command and Conquer: Renegade 26. No One Lives Forever Demo 27. AquaNox 28. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter 29. IL2: Shturmovik 30. MoHAA And 6.* drivers are not compatible with the software for sound cards based on Yamaha processor, as well as with SoftXG100 software synthesizer. Start or Close Window buttons might be spoiled by some "garbage" in 2D mode. One solution is in the iXBT Forum. Andrew Worobyew (Anvakams@ixbt.com) Alexander Kondakov (kondalex@ixbt.com) Evgeniy Zaycev (eightn@ixbt.com) [an error occurred while processing this directive]