NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200-8x

The GeForce4 Ti4200-8x is a representative of the previous generation of graphics processors, a hit of the year 2002. Now it has sunk to the inexpensive products sector and loses in speed to mainstream newcomers. Still, it retains an appealing “price/performance” ratio.

We’ve got a GeForce4 Ti4200-8x card from Axle:

We’ve got small dimensions, an average cooler and a minimum of functionality here – but at a low price!

The card is equipped with 128MB of DDR SDRAM from Samsung with a cycle time of 4ns (Samsung K4D261638F-TC40). The nominal clock rates of the GPU and memory are 250/512 (256DDR) MHz. Curiously, this memory is rated for 500MHz at maximum, while the manufacturer of the card makes the chips work at 512MHz instead of using faster, but more expensive memory.

The card did well at overclocking, for its class: 300/550MHz.

Now we have shuffled our cards – let’s play?

Testbed and Methods

The testbed was configured like follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 2800MHz CPU (Northwood, 800MHz FSB);
• ASUS P4C800 mainboard (i875P chipset);
• 2x512MB TwinMOS PC3200 DDR SDRAM (CL2.5).

Software:

• Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 1 installed;
• DirectX 9.0b;
• Catalyst 4.3 for graphics cards on GPUs from ATI;
• ForceWare 56.64 for graphics cards on GPUs from NVIDIA.

We tested all graphics cards in two operational modes. In both cases, the graphics quality was set to the maximum in the driver (the texture quality setting in Catalyst and the “speed-performance” slider in the ForceWare panel), but we also enabled 8x anisotropic filtering and 4x full-screen anti-aliasing in the second mode. We tried to avoid other factors interfering with the results of the cards proper, so we ran all games without sound (save for Deus Ex 2 that refused to launch without sound). Vsync was disabled.

We had high speeds and high resolutions in our previous article. Now that we deal with slower products we limit ourselves with 1024x768 and 1280x1024 without FSAA and AF and 1024x768 for FSAA+AF.