DVD/DiVX Playback
Movie PlaybackMost reviews I read these days are about is technical specs and 3D performance ? Yes, in general we do basically use three overall features from a videocard, those are of course play games, use it as 2D interface to interact with an operating system and ... a much forgotten item in reviews nowadays is of course multimedia/movie playback. In a previous review of I believe it was GeForce3 I stated that NVIDIA should take a good look at ATI when talking about dual monitor setups and movie playback through the S-Video connector. Well, NVIDIA did that and more ..
Seriously, movie playback over video-output has improved heaps over previous generations. I can start stories about what and why this has changed, the new driver 'tweaks' bob and weave interlacing etc ... But basically it's all way too much blah blah and well, this review is already a tad longer then our normally also way too long reviews.
Images taken a GeForce4 Ti from the movie: Austin Powers - Gold Member - JPEG compression makes it a bit fuzzy.
Basically, all you need to know is that playback is now truly at a level that can compare equally with ATI's Radeon 7500/8500 playback. DiVX playback quality was good and performance wise handled at videocard level as CPU load was about 3-4% over measured over the entire system.
The nfiniteFX II Engine
The nfiniteFX IIs dual Vertex Shaders inject personality into characters and environments like never before, and the GeForce4 Ti GPUs advanced Pixel Shaders with new Z-correct bump mapping, enable surface detail never before seen on the desktop, so that the resulting images are as life-like as possible. Delivering more than three times the Vertex Shader geometry power and nearly two times the Pixel Shader performance over previous-generation GPUs, the GeForce4 Ti GPU also processes shading effects faster than any other GPU on the market today, ensuring developers have the graphics horsepower required to create effects that were previously not imaginable.
Computer graphics research has always pushed the boundaries of software and hardware, forcing us to ask the question: If the technology were fast enough, what else could be done?l, Thankfully, as hardware and software technologies advance, some of these questions can now be answered. The GeForce4 family of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) with dedicated high-speed memory pipelines are capable of calculating billions of operations per second, and enable the development of unbelievably complex effects through their powerful shading instruction sets. Through the use of their integrated dual vertex and advanced pixel shaders, the GeForce4 GPUs have unleashed ferocious graphics power on many of the computer graphics research topics currently being studied. A great example of the power behind the GeForce4 GPUs are their inherent ability to solve one of the classic computer graphics problems of all time: how to render realistic hair and fur. Animals that have skin textures have traditionally been easier to render than fur. For example, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were easier to make lifelike and believable than the animals in the safari movie Jumanji. Trying to render hair and fur in real time has historically resulted in animals that looked plastic, stiff, and constrained. Computer-generated hair and fur should give the appearance of texture and movement, and it should show off the subtle reflections and light absorption that real hair or fur would in a given situation. For the first time ever, and only through the power of NVIDIAs nfiniteFX II engine, which includes support for dual vertex shaders, advanced pixel shader pipelines, 3D textures, shadow buffers and z-correct bump mapping, is it now possible to render, among other things, incredibly complex, high quality hair and fur while delivering very fast frame rates.
