Graphics Cards for Every Budget

VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600
As the primary manufacturer of NVIDIA's reference boards, VisionTek's Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 follows NVIDIA's reference design to the letter. With the exception of an S-video TV-out port and a Digital Visual Interface I (DVI-I) connector for flat-panel displays, you won't find any amenities such as video capturing or even a software bundle. Then again, if you're willing to shell out $399 for a 3-D card, you probably already have any game that VisionTek might have considered including with this card.

The Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 features a 300MHz core paired with a staggering 128MB of 325MHz DDR RAM (which effectively yields 650MHz). With a massive 10.4GBps of memory bandwidth to boot, the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 provides a ridiculous amount of polygon pushing power.

For testing, I matched up the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 with NVIDIA's 23.48 drivers for Windows XP. I installed the card in a 1GHz Pentium III system in less than 5 minutes (including the time it took to remove my PC's cover). I removed the drivers for my old graphics card and plugged in the new card; Windows automatically detected the card and installed NVIDIA's drivers. The drivers provide a multitabbed control panel to configure the card, including radio buttons to enable and disable features such as Vsync and HRAA. Users who want to really tweak the card (e.g., calibrate the color, set display-related hotkeys, configure refresh rates) will want to use a third-party program, but the drivers' control panel lets you handle the most common functions.

In every game I tested ranging from Quake III to Max Payne to Serious Sam to Return to Castle Wolfenstein to 3DMark 2001, the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 returned a better frame rate than any card I've ever tested. If raw power is your thing, you must run out and get this card-even before you finish reading this article. The GeForce4 Ti 4600 is the fastest consumer-level GPU available on the PC platform today.

What's especially impressive about the GeForce4 Ti 4600 is that we finally have a GPU that can run games at ultra-high resolutions without compromising performance. Running Quake III at a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200 x 32, the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 makes every other graphics architecture look silly by sustaining an average of 115 frames per second (fps), which is simply unprecedented.

The GeForce4 Ti 4600's superlative performance is well known, thanks to its new memory architecture. The real test of the GPU's mettle comes when you test HRAA performance on legacy games. So what can you expect from the GeForce4 Ti 4600's HRAA? Excellent performance, even at high resolutions. In every game I tested, the GeForce4 Ti 4600's Quincunx anti-aliasing mode doesn't cause even one hiccup. Even at a reasonably high resolution (e.g., 1280 x 1024 x 32), Quake III played at a more-than-adequate 90fps. Although the visual quality of Quincunx doesn't match the Voodoo5 running at 4X Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA), you won't suffer the performance hit associated with that level of anti-aliasing.

With DirectX 8.0-enhanced games, the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 pulls far ahead of the competition. Using AquaMark as a benchmark, the card blew away a still-respectable GeForce2 Ultra while leaving the former king—the GeForce3 Ti 500—in the dust. This type of performance is important because DirectX 8.0 games are already hitting the shelves—and nothing can run them as well as a GeForce4-based card.

Finally, I used an S-video cable to connect the card to a standard TV so that I could test the card's TV output. With a hard limit of 800 x 600 resolution, you probably won't want to use the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600's TV-out to perform work-related tasks, but games are extremely playable and DVD playback—especially when you connect to a display that supports a progressive scan signal—is excellent. The visual quality of the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 doesn't quite match the quality of ATI Technologies' RADEON 8500, but most users won't have much to complain about unless they're serious about their home theater.

Because the GeForce4 architecture doesn't include a hardware DVD decoder, the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 supports motion compensation to alleviate the load on the CPU when the CPU is decoding Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG)-2 video. Motion compensation uses predictive coding to let the chip analyze the contents of a scene to determine the number of moving objects. The chip uses this data to measure the motion within the scene and predict the content of upcoming frames. The result is a smoother picture with less video artifacting and dropped frames.

The Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 is as future-proof as today's graphics cards come. Sure, you can buy other cards that offer excellent performance at a fraction of this card's costs, but by doing so you limit your options. Simply put, every 3-D game currently in development for the PC platform leverages the power and features of DirectX 8.0, and the GeForce4 Ti 4600 supports every one of those features in hardware. If you have the money, the Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4600 lets you play today and tomorrow's games fast enough to satisfy your adrenaline rushes while bombarding you with the most visceral eye candy around. What more can you ask for?

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