G4Ti4600-VT2D8X: With the GeForce FX still MIA, we take a look at their current flagship, the GeForce 4 Ti4600, souped up with AGP8x. The MSI version also breaks away from reference by including their own cooling system.
3D quality is very important, and while this card includes improvements to it allowing for higher quality graphics, it also allows for the ability to increase the quality of the picture in any game. Like all the other GeForce 4 (and MX) series it has 'Accuview' Antialiasing, and up to 8X (64 samples) ansiotropic filtering. Let us see what improvement increasing the quality settings does for the quality of the picture, which we will compare to the Parhelia and Kyro II. If you would like to see any of these pictures in bmp format, please e-mail me or let me know in our forums.
Parhelia
MSI GF4/GF4 MX
Kyro II
No AA or Ansiotropic filtering
No AA or Ansiotropic filtering
No AA or Ansiotropic filtering
2X AA
2X Horizontal AA
Quincunx AA - Ansiotropic filtering
2X Vertical AA
4X AA + 2X Ansiotropic filtering
4X AA + 2X Ansiotropic filtering
4X AA + Ansiotropic filtering
16X FAA + 2X Ansiotropic Filtering
4XS AA + 2X Ansiotropic filtering
4XS AA + 4X Ansiotropic filtering
4XS AA + 8X Ansiotropic filtering
We can see the 4XS mode of antialiasing is a very large improvement over the previous maximum AA setting of Nvidia based video cards. If we look at the pictures of 4X AA and 4XS AA of the MSI card we see that this setting brings the image fairly close to the quality of the 16X FAA of the Parhelia, though it is still not quite as good as the Parhelia. The ansiotropic filtering of the Nvidia card is better than the Parhelia is in my opinion at the same settings, and is equal to the quality of the Kyro II's ansiotropic filtering. All in all given 4XS and 2X ansiotropic, this card is almost as good as the Parhelia for AA and better than the Parhelia and similar to the Kyro II in ansiotropic filtering. With the improvement in ansiotropic filtering the quality of the MSI card increases more. This can be seen by looking at the ground in the pictures, there is a noticeable difference between the 2X, 4X and 8X ansiotropic settings, as the ground looks much sharper and more detailed with the increase in the number of samples used to create this image.
G4Ti4600-VT2D8X: With the GeForce FX still MIA, we take a look at their current flagship, the GeForce 4 Ti4600, souped up with AGP8x. The MSI version also breaks away from reference by including their own cooling system.
