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Benchmarks
Ok, time to put the card through its paces. As I'm sure you're pretty much all aware by now, one of the big selling points of a GeForce 4 card besides the performance increase is the FSAA (Full Screen Anti Aliasing) abilities of the card. I'll be testing the abilities of FSAA as well as taking a look at a few screen shots to try and show you the difference it can make to your images under OpenGL and DirectX. I'll also be seeing how far I can push this card, see if we can't warm those ramsinks up a bit.
The side of my case will be left off for 2 reasons. 1) I want to keep the PC interior and the card as cool as possible to see just how far I can push it and 2) because my current case is crap and I have to remove the side to do anything intensive.
The usual benchmarks will be used for testing at 3 different screen sizes. V-Sync will be kept off and unless otherwise indicated all other settings will be as per first installation. I'll be comparing it with the systems previous card, a GeForce 2 GTS from Creative.
The test system is as follows:
1.4 Athlon Thunderbird
Asus A7V266
GeForce 4 Ti4600 at "enhanced" clock settings (310/680)
GeForce 2 GTS 32 meg at standard settings
512 meg of Crucial PC2100 (at aggressive timings)
Windows XP Pro
Detonator drivers 28.32's
Via 4in1's version 14.37's
Quake 3 Arena
First up is Quake III Arena (1.31). This game is getting a bit long in the tooth but is good to show just how much of an increase from my GeForce 2 card there is. A clean config was used and the menu options were set to highest quality, with texture set to maximum.
Geforce 2 GTS (no FSAA)
1024*768 102.6fps
1280*1024 89.8fps
1600*1200 39.9fps
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (no FSAA)
1024*768 124.3fps
1200*1024 123.3fps
1600*1200 120.4fps
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (2x FSAA)
1024*768 122.3fps
1200*1024 121.1fps
1600*1200 119.2fps
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (4x FSAA)
1024*768 114.5fps
1200*1024 114.0fps
1600*1200 112.9fps
This test shows a clear increase in performance. For the system that it's running on the numbers are good. It also show's the GeForce 4 is a lot better at scaling to higher resolutions. There's a big decrease with the GeForce 2 card the higher we go, but with the GeForce 4 the difference is minimal even with 4x FSAA.
Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast
Next up is Jedi Knight II: Outcast. This is a recent addition to our testing procedures here at the Lair and utilizes an enhanced version of the Quake III engine (actually the Team Arena code). So let's see how we do here with the included demo jk2ffa.
Geforce 2 GTS (no FSAA)
1024*768 63.5fps
1200*1024 58.9fps
1600*1200 50.5fps
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (no FSAA)
1024*768 85.2fps
1200*1024 84.8fps
1600*1200 82.9fps
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (2x FSAA)
1024*768 85.1fps
1200*1024 83.3fps
1600*1200 80.5fps
Geforce 4 Ti4600 (4x FSAA)
1024*768 85.0fps
1200*1024 83.0fps
1600*1200 80.1fps
We can see here that Jedi Knight puts more of strain on the card than Quake III Arena, which is to be expected. The performance of the card however is still impressive with a very nice increase over the GeForce 2. The GeForce 2 doesn't do all that bad to be honest, and even scale's with the resolution quite well. I believe the reason that the scores are similar for the GeForce 4 across the board is due to 2 reasons. 1) The rest of my system isn't holding it's end up and supplying data quick enough. 2) This particular demo isn't very good to use to test FSAA as there isn't really much on the map to anti-alias.
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