Geforce4 GPU itself 256bit, but not 512bit

Memory bits are diffrent from GPU bits

YOU SAID???-----------------------------------------------------------
GeForce3/4 : 4x 64 bit DDR memory path, gets chunks of 32 and 64 bits of data. Equals 512 bit.

You are talking about "MEMORY BITS" but not GPU bits!!!

You got confuse with bits............

The Geforce 4 Ti (4xxx) is 256bit GPU.

Nvidia has not realese 512bit GPU Architecture.

------------------------------------------------
Nvidia first generation: 64bit GPU
Nvidia TNT: 128bit GPU
Nvidia TNT2, Pro, Ultra: 128bit GPU
Nvidia Geforce 1: 256bit GPU
Nvidia Geforce 2, MX, GTS, Pro and Ultra: 256bit GPU
Nvidia Gefroce 3, Titanium: 256bit GPU
Nvidia Geforce 4, Titanium: 256bit GPU

But where is 512bit GPU + 8x AGP support.
It is obsolete card.
It does not have/support 500Mhz/550Mhz RAMDAC
It does not have/support DDR-2 /533Mhz
It does not have/support 0.13/0.11 micron tech.

Hm...it's not a 512 bit?
Well, with all kudos to boy wonder Anand, LMA and LMA II are NOT 32-bit DDR pathways...four of them, to be more exact.

GeForce3/4 : 4x 64 bit DDR memory path, gets chunks of 32 and 64 bits of data. Equals 512 bit.

GeForce4 MX: 2x 64 bit DDR memory path, gets chunks of 32 and 64 bits of data. Equals 256 bit.

ATi's R8500: 2x 128 bit DDR memory path, gets chunks of 64 and 128 bits of data. Equals 512 bit.

ATi's R7xxx: 2x 64 bit DDR memory path, gets chunks of 32, 64 and 128 bits of data. Equals 256 bit.

Don't bog me down, I am just a journalist who these to companies....hate :-)

The only thing Geforce 4 TI (4xxx) is missing?

It does not have/support AGP 8x
It does not have/support 512bit GPU.
It does not have/support 500Mhz/550Mhz RAMDAC
It does not have/support DDR-2 /533Mhz
It does not have/support 0.13/0.11 micron tech.

If Geforce 5 will not support this? then it is obsolete card.

Yo, corrosive #62. Check this presentation slide if you think the GF3 will continue on. Looks like it vanishes to me. The Ti200 will be the low end until supplies dry up.

http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vidcards/nvidia/gf234/direction.html

MadMadOriginal - Actually, the companies that don't have the time or money to use shaders in their games are the ones that churn out derivative games as quickly as they can. i.e. The kinds of companies that started cranking out FPSs when they where at their peak, then went on to RTSs when Command and Conquer was popular, etc. When you're trying to make money off a "hot" gene, you need to be able to get a game out the door while its still hot, and that means no time for fancy stuff.

Then there's id, whose stuff tends to *define* what's hot, so they can take their sweet time and let Carmack do whatever he wants.

Damn some of you have no idea what you are talking about. they have not cancled the gf3 line. The gf3 ti200 is now going to be the "low-end" card, and the ti500 which was a rip-off to begin with is being phased out.

[q]As for devs making games that use the shaders. Um duh they do that already they just as with everything else make sure they have fallbacks. [/q]

Not necessarily. With the tight budgets and time constraints placed on game devs today, why would they spend extra time coding for shaders that very few have? heck, most have a hard enough time releasing a workable product as it is. Sure, the "big guys" like Id, et al., have the resources, but they are few and far between. It is the little houses that are truly innovating that do not have the $$ or time to waste programming for shaders.

Many TVs have different types of filters on them now with all sorts of marketing names so that you can't tell what they actually do, but for the most part TVs don't do the de-interlacing thing because it won't be needed when they all move to digital/HDTV formats. Besides if I were playing a reflex-driven console game I wouldn't want that delay because I would ever be able to make any jumps or anything. 20ms may not seem like that much but I know I notice the 20ms difference on the games online and I think it would be just as obnoxious on a tv.

[q]Well, given there is a market of people who are perfectly happy with the MX200 level graphics the IGP of their nForce provided them[/q] Then why don't they keep the MX200 in production? But they don't... they are even planning to drop the GF3 cards, and force everyone to GF"4" prices -- despite the fact that they've doubtlessly written off the GF3 setup costs.

It's about more money for them, and less choice for everyone else. And that's cool -- capitalism, it's called. But it doesn't change the fact they're playing a large fraction of the user population for suckers.

#54, I guess what I was referring to was the old, old consoles like the NES and SNES that have a vertical resolution of only 240 lines or so. It could have been a trick of the eye but the images didn't look interlaced at all - I could clearly see the scan lines.

55

I agree. It seems all the new generation offers is 15-20% more performance. Whoopee? I'm not impressed. I guess it is difficult to expect Voodoo 1 to 2 or Geforce SDR to DDR jumps in performance any more. Graphics cards are finally catching up to the level of CPUs, with slower gains over time and granulated speed ratings. At least we don't have the megaHertz myth to deal with.

AG #54:

While this is true for the most part in 1992 a few TVs hit the market that would digitally process TV images (incurring a 20ms delay) and make them non-interlaced. My parents then bought and still own such a TV. It's a 32" by Toshiba. Unfortunately they faded from the market as most people weren't willing to pay $3000 for a 32" TV when one could be had for $1500-2000.

The picture quality of this 9 year old TV is much, much better than my 1 year old, interlaced, 27" Sony Wega. I don't understand why TVs don't feature this now as the technology has become much cheaper.

Glad I am the only one NOT excited about this generation of hardware. Maybe I have been just too spoiled by the current generation of console system's lush fully realized graphics to really care about these cards. They still have not fully taken advantage of hardware 2 years old, and they expect me to buy this? Riiight...

[q]It's only recently that the consoles have been using interlaced mode on TVs (PS2, XBOX, GameCube and maybe Dreamcast) and TVs are better at handling interlacing than computer displays. I've never had a chance to see 1080i in person, maybe interlacing doesn't look too bad on a HDTV screen. [/q]

Umm perhaps I misred this, so forgive me if I'm arguing nothing, but R2P2 is right. Pretty much all TV's out there (with the exception of HD's, and plasmas and some other fangled TVs I don't know about) work in interlaced. Only with the new sets that have come out has progressive even been an option. Regular tv's haven't done it because cable, antenna, satellite and even DVD(initially) didn't support it. Consoles have always been running in interlaced mode on TVs because that is what the TV's support so it doesn't make sense to add hardware for something that won't be used ESPECIALLY when you're losing money on the hardware to begin with. Also TV's aren't really better at handling interlacing, their images just suck so bad that interlacing isn't really noticeable whereas looking at a computer screen at our super high resolutions would cause interlacing to stand out like a red thumb.

All nvidea is doing is replacing the mx2 line with the mx 4 line and the gf3ti line with the gf4 ti line. Tho I have a hunch the gf3 ti200 might stay around awhile.

Simple as that.

As for devs making games that use the shaders. Um duh they do that already they just as with everything else make sure they have fallbacks.

Only now instead of falling back to the mx2 in about a year they will fall back to the mx4 level of power. Quite a leap up frankly so shut your whiney yap and sit down!

The mx line is for BUDGET cards and the shaders are too big to cram into such a small chip. The prices as always will drop a ton and in fact are the same prices the mx 2 started at so pththththt.

I havnt seen so many clueless people milling about screaming since I accidentaly switched on cspan.

#48

Yeah, that's impressive that it pulls off a fair efficiency increase. Although as some other posters have and will have stated, it's been about a year. The speed increase is moderate, and the features increase is not worth mentioning.

Sadly, it's not like anyone is going to greatly eclipse them either.

[q]Simple. Because they know there's one born every minute... and Nvidia has shown they're not above fleecing the market.[/q]

Well, given there is a market of people who are perfectly happy with the MX200 level graphics the IGP of their nForce provided them:

http://cweb.msi.com.tw/eforum/?target=article&tid=9213

it seems rather plausible to me that perhaps we are pushing the reality of our niche onto a market that's a bit more diverse.

From Damage's article: [q]What doesn't make sense to me is why in the world NVIDIA is introducing this product, with this 3D rendering pipeline, at the beginning of 2002.[/q] Simple. Because they know there's one born every minute... and Nvidia has shown they're not above fleecing the market.

[i]This is NOT just a higher clocked GF3 good people.[/i]

Well, they [i]hav/i] had a year to tweak the design. A [bea/b]. That doesn't sound like a six-month product cycle to me, not does it sound like a new architecture per year, and I don't see the bar set too high for ATi to compete. It just sounds like a natural progression, much like AMD and Intel bump clock speeds. I have high hopes for the R300, but I'm not sure I'll wait that long to upgrade.

But the GF4 is still impressive, moreso because nV will phase out the GF3 completely.

Check out the article on Anandtech. He benches a Ti4600 against a Ti500 and clocks the 4600 DOWN to the same core/mem speed as the 500.

The 4600 generally shows a 10-15% increase in performance across the board over the Ti500 using the same speed settings.

The other thing you will notice is that because of the improvements in memory handling, running at HIGH resolutions with AA turned on is not only possible, you can do so at frame rates that are more than acceptable.

This is NOT just a higher clocked GF3 good people.

until ATI can support it's products with quality drivers, they are no competition for nVidia. and what is ATI's product development cycle like? not good enough to mach nV's, i'm sure. what is needed is a new player. ATI will probably never be able to compete with nVidia over the longterm. They'll fall too far behind, like 3dfx.

[q]Steel -- Um, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe normal TVs only display interlaced, so if you've ever played a game on a TV you've probably played it interlaced. I haven't heard anyone complain about the interlacing on their PS2 (or XBOX, or GameCube, or SNES, or...) giving them a headache. [/q]It's only recently that the consoles have been using interlaced mode on TVs (PS2, XBOX, GameCube and maybe Dreamcast) and TVs are better at handling interlacing than computer displays. I've never had a chance to see 1080i in person, maybe interlacing doesn't look too bad on a HDTV screen.

While we await TR's GF4 review, check out Digit-Life's mind-numbingly detailed review:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/gf4/index1.html

Some interesting stuff, and an overall a typically excellent (superlative?) review. They've even devloped their own benchmark with iXBT Labs! But they, like too many sites, don't indicate whether tri is enabled with aniso when they compare the GFx's to the 8500.

It's interesting how much better Serious Sam does with an Athlon XP than with a P4--the lone bench where the XP (significantly) outperforms the P4. GamePC also show SS reaping huge gains from higher memory speeds, gaining almost 40% with a 533 FSB / PC-1066 RDRAM. A P4-NW 1.6@2.1 / 533 FSB and a GF4 4200 might be the sweet spot for gamers.

#28 Nvidia have "Nvidia distance fog" which works not like ATIs "Trueform" which dont.

The new GF4s are great, more fps, always more fps, plz!

Originally Posted by Transman88
Not much new in the way of features. New AA and LMA2 sound nice.

Heh, reminds me of when 3dfx released the Voodoo3. Lotsa people called it the Banshee2 because the only differences between it and the banshee were higher core/mem clocks and a TMU.

Originally Posted by nuclear
ag #39
You are right. But the progressive image will have better quality on faster movement because you will not have the problem that the first field is a little late compared to the second field. In some fast movement on the tv, you might see it.

There's a resone why theres no games. and its mostly because companies like nvidia to remove the features. no company would write code to use it if no one has it.

[q]1920x1080i = 960x540p [/q]

Huh? There is no halving of horizontal resolution. Think half, not quarter.

[qut since it takes twice the time to fill those lines in the same frame of time as a progressive [/q]

It was my understanding that an interlaced signal at 30 frames per second was actually 60 fields per second. So an entire frame (2 fields) is filled in the same time as a progressive image at 30 frames per second.

I'm not arguing that progressive is not better, though.