PC Graphics Beyond XBOX - NVIDIA Introduces GeForce4

Conclusion GeForce4 MX

NVIDIA blessed us with a whole lot of new products today and it's really not easy to keep the overview. Let's start with the 'little' GeForce4, the GeForce4 MX line of cards.

When you look at the three different GeForce4 MX offerings, it is easy to see that the low-end version, the GeForce4 MX420, will be a product for OEMs only. Its 166 MHz SDRAM memory will slow down the performance of the GeForce4 MX chip so much that it will hardly perform any better than previous GeForce2 MX400 cards that you can get for a mere 50 bucks.

The performance of the GeForce4 MX440 and 460 cards, however, proved to be very impressive. Especially the GeForce4 MX460, which is able to score results as high as those of the GeForce3 Ti200, or even the Ti500 cards. Both are able to beat ATi's Radeon 7500 in most cases.

Still, none of the GeForce4 MX cards has full DirectX 8.x support, because of its lack of vertex and pixel shaders. This weighs heavily when you remember the lowest priced offering out of the GeForce4 Ti bunch of cards. It's only $20 more than GeForce4 MX460.

I therefore suggest the GeForce4 MX440 for value buyers, but they should try to get the price down to less than $149. Better yet, a value buyer should watch out for GeForce3 cards. Any GeForce3 card that costs less than $190 is a bargain right now. GeForce3 comes with full DirectX 8.x functionality, vertex/pixel shaders and lots of 3D power! If you can chose between a GeForce3 card and a GeForce4 MX card for similar prices, I would clearly go for the GeForce3!