The GeForce4 Ti Enhancements

Although the GeForce4 Ti's most obvious advancements over the GeForce3 are its larger standard configuration of RAM and faster DDR memory, these aren't the whole story when it comes to the reasons behind the GeForce4 Ti's increased performance. In addition the brute muscle approach, NVIDIA has incorporated several new technologies designed to increase the efficiency and speed of the GeForce4 Ti technology.

These include:

Enhanced Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA II): This enhanced version of the LMA technology introduced with the GeForce3 has a vastly improved Z-occlusion culling feature. This means that the GeForce4 Ti is up to 25% more efficient when dealing with overdraw (pixels on the screen that are rendered, but don't need to be) than the GeForce3 was.

Enhanced Vertex Shaders: The GeForce4 Ti also features a second vertex shader, bringing its total in line with the Radeon 8500 series from ATI. This is another feature that should make a large difference in games supporting the technology, once they become available later this year.

Accuview Antialiasing: The GeForce4 Ti also uses NVIDIA's new Accuview Antialiasing technique, a specialized engine designed to boost AA performance and image quality simultaneously. Certainly the card looks impressive on paper, with its efficiency and performance-boosting features, but our primary concern with the GeForce4 Ti was whether or not the card's enhancements would show have any meaningful real-world benefit. The GeForce3, after all, carried similar enhancements over the GeForce2, but they've gone largely unused even a year after the card's release.

Let's have a look at how the performance of the Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD stands up against the latest from NVIDIA and ATI, including the GeForce4 Ti 4400, GeForce3 Ti 500 and 200, and the ATI Radeon 8500.

Performance and Test System

Pentium 4 1.8A
VIA P4X266 (VPSD)
256 Meg Crucial PC2100 DDR-SDRAM
IBM 60GXP 7200 RPM 30 GB Drive
Windows XP Pro
NVIDIA 28.32 Drivers
ATI 7.60 Reference Drivers

Video Cards:
Leadtek A250 Ultra TD GeForce4 Ti 4600
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500
NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200
ATI Radeon 8500 Reference (64-MB)