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Albatron GeForce4 Ti4200 Video Card Review

Date: November 3, 2002

Test Setup:

Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-7VRXP
Processor	Athlon XP 2000+
RAM	2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700
Hard Disk	1 x 30GB Maxtor 7200
Video Cards	GeForce4 MX440 GeForce4 Ti4200P Turbo
Drivers	Windows: Dentonator Version 30.82 Linux: NVIDIA Version 1-0.3123
Operating Systems	Windows 2000 Professional SP3 Linux: Redhat 8.0 with Kernel 2.4.18-4
Testing Applications	Windows: Quake III Arena Jedi Knight II v 1.03 Unreal Tournament 2003 3D Mark 2001 SE Linux: Quake III Arena Jedi Knight II v1.03 (WineX) Unreal Tournament 2003
Testing Defaults	Display Resolution: 1024x768@32 bit with 60Hz Refresh Rate Vsync Disabled in both Windows and Linux

All (both Linux and Windows) benchmarks were run with High Detail settings. I tried best to mimic the quality settings for the two environments. For the Windows UT2003 benchmark, I used the utility produced by [H]ardOCP to aid in the benchmarking. They actually have an updated version of their program complete with a GUI front end. On the Linux side, I used our home grown UT2003 benchmarking utility. Of course I used Q3Bench for benchmarking Quake III under windows and manually ran the benchmarks under Linux. Jedi Knight II was a long drawn out process that I don't want to get into.

Overclocking:

Looking at this card on paper one would think it would have some great overclocking possibilities. Truth be know, this card was highly overclockable. On the GPU side, I was able to push the core clock speed up to 310MHz without any issues. One of the reasons for being able to over clock this core was the heatsink and fan combination that Albatron matched with this card. On the memory side, I had figured an easy overclock of somewhere around 610MHz. That's not asking for to much from 3.3ns DDR. Sure enough, I reached 610MHz and went way beyond that. 670MHz in fact. Anything more then that and visual distortions would appear during game play.

So to sum up the overclocking, I reached a comfortable overclock of 310MHz core GPU with the memory clocked at 670MHz. Compare that to the defaults on a Ti4600, 300MHz core GPU clock and 600MHz memory clock, and you see your not doing to bad. Your mileage may vary.

Linux Benchmarks:

Before I start into the benchmarks, I got several emails asking how to disable VSYNC and Enable/Disable Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Texture Filtering under Linux. These features are controlled by setting values to a couple environment variables. For disabling VSYNC, simply set the environment variable, __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK, to 0. For Anti-Aliasing, set the environment variable, __GL_FSAA_MODE, to 0. And for Anisotropic Texture Filtering, set the __GL_DEFAULT_LOG_ANISO environment variable to 0. Of course if you wish to enable these features you can simply substitute the desired setting. For a complete listing of the possible values, check out the README file that is available when you download the NVIDIA drivers. To have this done automatically when you log in, add the appropriate entries to your startup profile.

On to the benchmarks..

I like what I see here. Jedi Knight II plays very well under Linux using the increasingly popular WineX emulator. 44 FPS with all the bells and whistles on is quite playable. If you have the need for speed, disable some of the bells and the video card will deliver 83 FPS.

The ever popular Quake III benchmark demonstrates the power of Ti4200 card by delivering over 200 FPS. Of course adding some extras sees a drop of about 140FPS but to be honest, 65 FPS for the good stuff is definitely doable.

Linux Benchmarks Continued -->