NVIDIA´s neue GeForce 4 MX und GeForce 4 Ti im Test

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

The topmodel: GeForce4 Ti4600

NVIDIA's new showstopper is the GeForce4 TI series with its flagship model, the GeForce4 TI 4600. The GF4 is not a completely new chip, though. Instead, NVIDIA took the GeForce3 and expanded on its strengths, tweaking and fine-tuning it along the way. Still, this isn't just a faster GF3 revision. The GeForce4 incorporates 63 million transistors, a full 3 million more than the GeForce3. There will be three different GeForce4 boards: 4600, 4400, and 4200.

Here you can see the new models as compared to the former high-end model of the GeForce 3 series:

	GeForce4 Ti4600	GeForce4 Ti4400	GeForce4 Ti4200	GeForce3 Ti500
Chip Clock	300 MHz	275 MHz	225 MHz	240 MHz
Memory Clock	650 MHz (DDR)	550 MHz	500 MHz	500 MHz
Memory	128 MB	128 MB	128 MB	64 MB
Memory Bandwith	10,400 MB/s	8,800 MB/s	8,000 MB/s	8,000 MB/s
Max Fillrate (theoretical)	1,200 Mpixel/s	1,100 Mpixel/s	900 Mpixel/s	960 Mpixel/s
Price	$399	$299	$199	$299

A Detailed Look at the new Specifications

63 million transistors (roughly 3 millionen more than the GeForce3)
produced on TSMC's .15 µ process
core clockspeeds of 225 - 300 MHz
memory clockspeeds of 500 - 650 MHz
memory bandwidth of 8,000 - 10,400 MB/s
TnL capability of 75 - 100 million vertices/s
128 MB video and graphics memory
nfiniteFX II engine

The GeForce4 TI's will be 8-layer boards. The reference design uses Samsung 4Mx32 (2.8 ns for the 4600) memory in a micro-BGA package. When we get to the benchmarks you will see some major performance increases compared to the GeForce3 TI 500, a card that also can't be called by any means slow. These performance jumps are not the result of new technologies or techniques, however. The engineers have simply been able to take full advantage of the GeForce3's capabilties and fine-tuned the core.

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