JUST ABOUT ACCORDING TO schedule, NVIDIA has unveiled a top-to-bottom refresh of its entire desktop graphics product line. The new NVIDIA chips, dubbed GeForce4 Ti and GeForce4 MX, bring with them a number of new features and better performance, which is always a good thing. However, they do little to advance the state of the art in 3D graphics, nor has the GeForce4 Ti unambiguously recaptured the technology lead from ATI's Radeon 8500.

As always, the GeForce4 chips have been launched with much fanfare—NVIDIA knows how to throw a mean party—and with a torrent of new "marketing terms" to help describe the chip's technology to the public. And as always, our analysis of the GeForce4 will go beyond the marketing terms to give you the skinny on the GeForce4 scene. Read on to find out what's new—and what's not—in NVIDIA's latest GPUs.