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Asus V8460 Ultra Deluxe in the test: The video talent with shutter glasses

Asus V8460 Ultra Deluxe in the test: The video talent with shutter glasses

Technology

Even if the technical detail s the GeForce4 series has meanwhile been more than chewed through, including in our little preview , we want to repeat some of the key data for newcomers or those who are easily forgetful.

Features of the GeForce4 Ti series

  • nFiniteFX Engine II - Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
  • Accuview Anti-Aliasing - Multisampling Anti-Aliasing Hardware
  • Lightspeed Memory Architecture II - Bandwidth-saving measures
  • nView Display Technology - Independent control of multiple displays
  • Shadow buffer and real-time shadows in hardware
  • Dot3 and environment mapped bump mapping in hardware
  • DirectX and S3TC texture compression
  • High Performance 2D Rendering Engine
  • High Quality HDTV/DVD playback
  • High Definition Video Processor
  • DirectX 8.1 Support
  • OpenGL 1.3 Support

Here is a tabular overview with the three tested cards

GeForce4 Ti series in comparison
GeForce 3 Radeon 8500 LE GeForce4 Ti4600 128MB Chip nV20 R200 nV25 clock 200MHz 250MHz 300MHz RAM 64 MB 64 MB 128 MB clock 230MHz DDR 250MHz DDR 325MHz DDR memory bandwidth 7 , 36 GB/sec. 8.0 GB/sec. 10.4 GB/sec. Connection 128Bit DDR max.TnL performance 50MTri/sec. 62.5MTri/sec. 136MTri/sec. TnL-Engine nFinite FX Engine Smartshader nFinite FX Engine II Rendering Pipelines 4 max. Theo. Filling rate 800 MPix/sec. 1000 MPix/sec. 1200 MPix/sec. 1600 MTex/sec. 2000 MTex/sec. 2400 MTex/sec. AGP interface 4 transistors 57 million 60 million 63 million FSAA technology Multisampling (HRAA) Smoothvision Multisampling (Accuview) Multi monitor support nView Hydravision nView efficiency measures LMA Hyper-Z II LMA-II

Purely from the technical data, one could expect a fairly clear gradation, as the Radeon8500LE lies pretty much in the middle between the GeForce3, which is now more than a year old, and the current Asus v8460ultra DeLuxe. Because of the very different procedures that are undertaken, for example, to conserve bandwidth or are carried out with the FSAA and AF, this is not always the case.

For example, the GeForce3/4 uses multisampling for anti-aliasing, which saves a lot of fill rate compared to conventional supersampling, but has the property of not smoothing textures, but only polygon edges. On the other hand, the ATi implementation of anisotropic filtering does not work with trilinear filter and also creates unsightly artifacts at certain angles.

To bothTo roughly match, we decided for 2xFSAA (the quality version for the Radeon8500) and 4xAF for the high-quality settings, because in most situations the MipMap transitions are shifted far enough backwards so that they are no longer too annoying to attract attention. But more on that in the individual quality comparisons.

On the next page: Test system