The specs
Our very own Dr. Damage took a look at the new GeForce4 chips when they were announced in February. The GeForce4 name implies an advance in technology beyond the GeForce3, but the GeForce4 MX chips lack a number of features that you'll find in even the GeForce3 Ti 200. The most notable omissions in the GeForce4 MX chip are vertex and pixel shaders. Without them, the GeForce4 MX chip is more prone to obsolescence as new games begin to require these advanced features.

Let's take a look at how the GeForce4 MX 440's theoretical performance matches up against what we'll be facing it off against today.

Unlike the GeForce3s, the GeForce4 MX 440 has only two pixel pipelines, making it look a lot more like a GeForce2. Still, the 270MHz clock speed does produce a fill rate of over 1 gigatexel/second.

As I mentioned earlier, memory bandwidth is becoming increasingly important in determining graphics performance; let's see how the GeForce4 MX 440 stacks up.

In terms of memory bandwidth, the GeForce4 MX 440 is right in line with NVIDIA's GeForce3 Ti 200. The effective 400MHz memory clock with DDR SDRAM isn't bad. The GeForce4 MX line uses a cut-down version of NVIDIA's Lightspeed Memory Architecture II from the GeForce4 Titanium. Its occlusion detection, Z compression, and more efficient memory access should result in more real-world throughput.

Our testing methods
As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. All tests were run three times, and the results were averaged.

When we were conducting testing, the newest official NVIDIA drivers were the 23.11s, so we used those for our comparative testing. Since the e-GeForce4 MX 440 came with the 27.20 driver set on its installation CD, we tested the card with those drivers. Yes, I know that NVIDIA just released a new set of official Detonators, but did you really want to have to wait another week for this review while I retested everything?

It seems a little ridiculous to throw a card as old and underpowered as the GeForce2 MX into our testing, but since the GeForce2 MX was the last time we saw the 'MX' moniker, it's more of a predecessor to the GeForce4 MX than anything in the GeForce3 line.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems' Windows desktop was set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at a 75Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. Most of the 3D gaming tests used the high detail image quality settings in 32-bit color.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.