PC Graphics Beyond XBOX - NVIDIA Introduces GeForce4

Introduction

The New Year has started and we knew it wouldn't take long for NVIDIA to launch their next chip. NVIDIA's arch enemy ATi had just managed to catch up with GeForce3 technology, so it was time for the Santa Clara based 'GPU'-developer to make another leap forward.

NVIDIA is lucky that in 3D graphics the situation is different from what we have seen lately in the microprocessor arena. It has become increasingly difficult these days to justify the purchase of a new CPU, because processors that are even one year old are still very much up to their job. Nobody really needs Intel's or AMD's 2+ Gigahertz monsters.

In 3D, things are better. If you look at today's 3D graphics you will see that there is still a lot of room for improvement. Even though 3D-hardware is now able to display acceptable high-resolution 3D scenes at reasonable frame rates, we still could not possibly mistake them for movies of real people and objects.

That is why NVIDIA is able to crank 3D-'realism' up another notch with GeForce4 Ti today. We will see more impressive effects, more realistic-looking scenes and more life-like motions in the demos from NVIDIA's latest high-end product.

NVIDIA was also able to see that the majority of people are unwilling to pay huge sums for this new level of 3D-realism. Those people know that they can have fun even with games that are more than a year old. For those guys, NVIDIA is introducing GeForce4 MX, a product that is a derivative of GeForce2 and missing the funky features of GeForce3 or GeForce4 Ti.