By Lars Weinand / Thomas Pabst (Tom´s Hardware Guide)

GeForce 4 Launch - We are the Titans!

Spring. Q1. Call it what you will, but every NVIDIA fan knows this time of year as launch time. This year is no different, and NVIDIA has just launched two new chips and no less than six new cards. The new performance line will be called "GeForce4 TI" and carries the new high-end chip, known under the codename NV25. The GeForce4 MX line, on the other hand, will replace the older GeForce2 MX as the budget and mass market offering and utilizes the smaller NV17 chip.

The last few years have seen some intense competition among the graphics chip companies. Therefore it takes no crystal ball to predict that this year will again be filled with announcements, launches and overall one-upmanship by the big players and arch-rivals in this game, namely ATi and NVIDIA. Last year is a good indication of just how hectic the pace can be. ATi's highly competitive RADEON 8500 has barely become available in the market in real quantities and already GPU-maker NVIDIA's Santa Clara Headquarters are issuing their answer to the challenge.

Both NVIDIA and ATi should consider themselves lucky, since the success of their rivalry is based on the fact that the world of 3D is still more or less in the beginning stages of its development. This is what makes each new product so desirable to their audience, enabling both to sell ever more chips. In comparison, things aren't quite as rosy in the CPU world. That arena has begun to quiet down. The problem is that almost nobody really needs the newest and fastest Gigahertz behemoths. Most people who bought a processor from either Intel or AMD in the last 12 months aren't really itching for an upgrade just yet - the performance of their current chip is already more than sufficient.

In comparison, a quick look at today's 3D graphics environments is enough to see that there is still a lot of unfulfilled potential. Although current 3D hardware is capable of rendering 3D scenes at very high resolutions while maintaining high framerates, anyone who's taken a look at even the most modern graphics demos knows that the effects and level of realism found in them still have a long way to go before they can be called truly realistic. This is exactly the direction NVIDIA is going with the GeForce4.

Nonetheless, most consumers are unwilling to follow a product cycle that would force them to pay a premium for each new generation of 3D accelerators that brings only one or two improvements over their previous card. They just want enough power to keep playing their favorite games. This is the audience NVIDIA is targeting with the new GeForce4 MX line - a card which is a bit inappropriately named. The GeForce4 MX is not a pared down GF4, but is based instead on a reworked and tuned GF2 MX core, which still lacks many important features of the GeForce3 and GeForce4 TI families.

So here we have NVIDIA's two new products. Well, almost new. Now more than ever, consumers will have to pay close attention to the name of the chip they are buying. The TI and MX lines are very different - and not just in price.

Copyright: 06.02.2002 -   RIVA Station 2002 - Lars Weinand
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