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Gainward GeForce4 Ti4200

by Len "Viking1" Hjalmarson

Article Type: Review
Article Date: July 16, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: PowerPack Ultra/650TV Golden Sample (64MB)
Version: GeForce4 Ti 4200
Category: Hardware - Video
Manufacturer: Gainward
Release Date: Released
Files & Links: Click Here

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In the whirl of recent announcements and introductions, it can be difficult to know when and how to upgrade. Do you go for the top of the line GeForce4 Ti4600? Sure, if you have excess cash on hand or know the president of your local bank.

But what about the rest of us, who dont have that advantage?


GeForce4 Alternatives
GeForce 4 is evolutionary, building on the features of the GeForce3 line while improving the speed and efficiency and memory bandwidth (for more information on the design differences see our previous reviews of GeForce4). The first boards to arrive were the Ti4400 and the Ti4600, both with 128 MB and differing only in clock speed and memory clock.

The difference at the top end is not that substantial, with the Ti4600 running at a clockspeed of 300/325 for the GPU and memory respectively. The Ti4400 runs at 275/275.

With frequencies so high these boards use an 8 layer PCB, and 3.5 ns memory. The Ti4200, on the other hand, with clock speed of 250MHz and memory speed of 250MHz, uses a 6 layer design.

With a difference of only ten percent in core clock and memory clock, one would expect as little as 10 percent performance difference, yet the out of pocket savings are around $90. Current Pricewatch.com listings average $140 for the Ti4200, even with DVI and TV output. This makes the Ti4200 the reigning champ of power upgrades for the budget gamer.


The Gainward Ti4200

The retail box

The immediate obvious differences in appearance of the Ti4200 to a Ti4400 are fewer capacitors and a much smaller fan/heatsink combination. In fact the HSF combination used on the Ti4200 is identical to the hardware appearing on the GeForce4 MX. I dont particularly like the HSF chosen for this design, but at these clock speeds it appears to do the job. Note that you will need a well ventilated case to do any overclocking with this design.

The heatsink/fan is attached to the GPU with a simple clamping arrangement. To my surprise, there is a bit of thermal grease between the heatsink and the chip. Surrounding the GPU core is 64MB of DDR SDRAM in a 4 x 16MB configuration lining the front and back of the card.

The DDR SDRAM runs at a default clock speed of 500 MHz for a total memory bandwidth of 8 GB/sec. Note that the 128MB version of this board uses slightly lower speed settings.

Gainward provides a single DVI-I monitor port. As DVI-enabled digital flat panel LCD's are becoming more common the inclusion of a DVI connector is almost expected. The connector can be used to power standard HD-15 analog LCD's.

VIVO interface

The third output is a 9-pin s-video-like connector that interfaces with Gainward's VIVO cable. Thats rightthis is both video in and video out, a value-added feature that will appeal to many gamers. This is about the cheapest method you can find to get video content on to your PC.

The included cable features a set of composite/s-video input and output cables to take advantage of the Philips SAA7108E video encoder chip on the board. The Philips chip allows TV output for resolutions up to 800 x 600. The Ti4200 comes with a copy of WinCoder and WinProducer to take advantage of the VIVO feature.

All three ports (HD-15, S-Video, DVI-I) can be used together with NVIDIA's nView multi-monitor software, allowing nine possible multi-monitor configurations with this card. nView is one of the best and easiest to use multi-monitor implementations out there, and very flexible to configure.

While some of the Ti4400s overclock by 15 percent or so, not all of them will run stably at 300 MHz. The Ti4200, on the other hand, will almost always clock 15 percent higher, and some are going as high as 33 percent for the core, and 25 percent for the memory.

I used the nVidia Coolbits registry hack to access the clock and memory speed settings (an easier way for most users is to use the NVTweak utility). From the default clock speeds of 250 / 250, I was able to clock my board up to 330 / 275 and still maintain stability.

Yes, you heard that right. I am running a Ti4200 at Ti4600 speeds. What does that mean for in game performance? Well get to that in a minute.

I worried that with frequency rates that high I might see some image anomalies, particularly in my 2-D desktop where there is no movement so distortion is easier to spot. To my delight, I didnt notice any artifacts or image distortion running the Ti4200 overclocked.


Test System Configuration and Benchmarks
  • Mobo: Abit KG-7
  • CPU: Athlon XP 2100 (1.73 GHz)
  • RAM: 512 MB Corsair PCI 2400
  • Hard Drive: IBM Deskstar 60GB, ATA 100
  • Audio: Creative Audigy
  • OS: WIN ME with DX 8.1
  • Video Driver: NVIDIA Detonator XP (29.42)
With the exception of the CPU, this system is now far from state of the art, although even the new VIA 333 chipsets arent giving a great performance boost.

This last winter, Novalogic released a benchmark based on Comanche 4 under DX 8.1. Its a good benchmark overall, but the test actually reflects system performance rather than video performance since it is CPU limited. In spite of that its helpful, and I ran the publicly available demo (here) with all options set to high and sound disabled.

Gainward Comanche 4 benchmarks

The default settings of the Ti4200 come in around 40 FPS. Clocked to GeForce4 Ti4600 speeds, the performance nearly equals that of the much more expensive board.

On the same system with the same driver, the GeForce3 Ti500 comes in around 35 FPS, and the GeForce4 MX follows not far behind at about 30 FPS. This makes the GeForce4 MX a good bargain, since prices are hovering around $65. One has to spend more than twice that to gain 10 FPS in the demo.

You can clearly see that the demo is CPU limited, with all three GeForce4 Ti boards coming in at nearly the same level of performance.

IL-2 Sturmovik Benchmarks

The results in IL-2 Sturmovik were similar, showing a similar CPU based limitation in testing. While performance of GeForce4 is far beyond GeForce3 Ti levels, it is still almost identical between the two GeForce4 boards when the Ti4200 is overclocked.

I couldnt tell any difference in performance between the Ti4200 overclocked and the Ti4600 in the same system. In fact, it was difficult to hold either board back, even when moving to higher resolutions. I find that running IL-2 Sturmovik at 1024x768 with Quincunx AA is now acceptable, where with my GeForce3 I was unable to maintain good performance.


AntiAliasing
The difference antialiasing makes in our modern simulations is very impressive. Anyone running the later 3dfx boards, or the GeForce2 or GeForce3 generations knows that 4x FSAA is a stunning improvement.

Unfortunately, antialiasing has never quite lived up to its promise with NVIDIA. Typically the performance penalty has been 25-30 percent, but that was only with very basic antialiasing. As soon as antialiasing was set at levels where a real difference was noticeable, in the 4x range, the performance penalty was dramatic. Adding anisotropic filtering to the mix, necessary to maintain texture quality when antialiasing was used, further degraded performance.

In an effort to improve performance, the GeForce4 series was redesigned and the portion of the GPU that looks after antialiasing became much larger.

Accuview is a new antialiasing option which uses more texture samples per pixel for greater accuracy. Antialiasing as a whole has been streamlined and is much more efficient, creating much less performance penalty than with the GeForce3 series. In fact, Quincunx antialiasing, which is equivalent to 4x, can now be performed at the same speed as 2x, which itself has been improved and has less penalty than with GeForce3. You can see that performance loss in IL-2 Sturmovik with Quincunx settings is only about 10 percent.


In-Game Tests
Image quality in-game using Quincunx AA is far improved over GeForce3. In IL-2 Sturmovik terrain textures in particular were more crisp, and clouds had a finer more wispy appearance. With the last generation, I had abandoned antialiasing in favor of higher resolution. With GeForce4 I can finally use high resolution (1280x1024) with antialiasing enabled.

Flying the Focke Wulf in IL-2 Sturmovik

I ran all my standard simulations on the Gainward Ti4200 without incident. These include:
  • Combat Flight Simulator 2
  • Comanche 4
  • European Air War
  • Falcon 4
  • Flanker 2.5
  • Flight Simulator 2002
  • IL-2 Sturmovik
  • Jane's WW2 Fighters
Of all these simulations, Flight Simulator 2002 was the best looking. I cant wait to see how Combat Flight Simulator 3 and LO: MAC run on my system.


Conclusion
Upgrade questions always seem to get complex. Do I change my CPU? Do I add more memory? Or do I need a new video board first?

In general if you have a 1 GHz class CPU or higher and are still running GeForce3 or older, you should consider upgrading your video hardware. If you have less than 256MB, add some more memory while youre at it!

If its time for you to upgrade your video hardware, the Ti4200 is an impressive board. While my Gainward board clocked higher than some Ti4200 series boards, a 25 percent overclock is common. At those levels performance between the Ti4200 and Ti4600 will not be distinguishable in your favorite simulation.

In terms of features, Gainward is one of the strongest boards on the market. About the only improvement they could make is to bundle the board with Flight Simulator 2002.

The GeForce4 Ti4200 is still too much cash for an upgrade. The GeForce4 MX is a good option if you are very budget minded. But if you can afford the difference the additional cash will get you performance that is almost state of the art. There really is no reason to look anywhere else for a budget gaming accelerator.



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