GeForce 4MX Technology
Now lets look at some of the interesting technology behind the GeForce 4MX 440 8X AGP.
8X AGP
This increase in AGP speed has more hype involved in its release, than it has any real performance increase over 4X AGP or even 2X/1X. As some sites have shown, the only way that the AGP port will do any good by increasing the bandwidth is by sending a very large amount of vertex and texture information to the card, as most cards, including this 'budget' card have at least 64MB of video memory with many others moving to 128MB and higher. The lack of any real need for texture data to be sent via system RAM as a larger amount of video RAM. The good points about the AGP 3.0 spec (which 8X AGP is part of) is the ability of system manufacturers to include more than one AGP slot on a board, yes that means that you may well be able to have a 4 or even 6 monitor setup sometime in the future.
LMA II
The newest version of Nvidia's 'Lightspeed Memory Architecture' is unimaginatively dubbed LMAII. What this technology is supposed to do is free the video card from the RAM limitation that was seen in the GeForce 1 and 2's. This technology allows for this increase by getting rid of any data that isn't needed from the z-buffer, and also by getting rid of whatever in the way of polygons and textures that aren't seen from the viewport. A good program to test the ability of a video card to efficiently reduce overdraw is Villagemark (by PowerVR), which we will look at in the benchmark section.
Hardware MPEG-2 Decoding
One area that I was really interested with the release of the GeForce 4 series was the inclusion (finally) of hardware IDCT and MC support. These features should allow for a lower CPU usage while watching DVD movies, and can help those with low specification computers (<500MHz) be able to watch DVD movies without the fear of the video playing in a 'choppy' manner. Also the support for HDTV 1080i video is a nice addition for any who have such a TV on hand and are looking to output video from their computers. So let us quickly look at whether this IDCT hardware support will lower CPU usage against the Matrox Parhelia (Motion Compensation support only) and the G400 (no DVD decoding support) on the test XP1800+.
| |
Total CPU Time |
CPU Time (%) |
| MSI GF4MX 440: |
35sec |
12.28 |
| Matrox Parhelia: |
41sec |
14.39 |
| Matrox G400: |
3:42 |
77.96 |
We can note that the MSI card does slightly better than the Parhelia, improving upon its CPU time by about 2%. The G400 managed a horrible 78% CPU utilization on the XP1800+ used for testing.
Overclocking
Due to the fact that the GeForce 4 MX is based on a refined .15µ process, and has 'only' 29 million transistors as well as using Hynix HY5DU283222F-36 FBGA 3.6ns RAM, this card has a very good overclocking potential. So how high did this card go, in allowing me to run all the benchmarks and games I felt like?
Albeit the normal speed I used for running this is about 390MHz core speed with a memory speed of 350MHz (700MHz DDR). But this is a very nice overclock, almost 50% for both the memory and GPU (42% and 47% respectively). We will see all the benchmarks with the overclocking settings used to see how much overclocking improves the performance of the MSI 8888. When overclocked I was able to play most games comfortably at 1024*768 with Quincunx AA and 2X Ansio enabled, but some games just didn't perform well enough (such as Madden 2003 and NBA Live 2003 demo), another point is that playing the NOLF2 demo there was a major loss in frame rate when the pocket light is turned on, making the game unplayable at any resolution.
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MSI GF4 MX440-VTD8X: Although not everyone has an AGP8x motherboard, you probably will have one soon. Although originally an AGP4x part, the GeForce 4 is being revamped for the eight speed bus. Question is, how much faster will the ride be?
