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The tag
line of XFX Graphics is simple, in your face, and provocative - "Video
Cards That Kick Ass." Don't believe me? Then check out the box sometime,
it's right on there! XFX recently released their powerful GeForce4 Ti4400
board, and we must admit, this card is one mighty piece of hardware action.
To give away a bit of the conclusion right away - I've been personally
playing the newest PC games such as Grand Theft Auto 3, and am currently
beta testing Warcraft III, which looks like the most anticipated game
of the year. And to put it simply - if you want to play these games at
MAXIMUM resolution levels, the XFX GeForce4 Ti4400 is the card to buy.
The
XFX GeForce4 Ti4400 is powered by Nvidia's NV25 Graphics Processing Unit.
Naturally people will compare this card to the 4200 (review coming soon)
and the 4600 (also coming soon). For background information, the only
significant difference between the Ti4600 and Ti4400 is to be found in
the core and memory speeds; the Ti4600 clocks in at a core speed of 300MHz
and memory clock of 600MHz while the XFX Ti4400 is set at 275MHz and 550MHz
respectively. Is this a huge difference? - well it should be as the cards
vary in street price anywhere from $50 to $100. But to put it plainly,
this card is perfect for those not wanting to overclock a Ti4200, and
for those that want to save some serious money (vs. a Ti4600), and still
get jaw-dropping performance - kind of like a best-of-both-worlds scenario.
Specifications
& Features
Hardware
Specs
- 275MHz
GPU
- 555
MHz RAM
- 128MB
RAM
Monitor
& Display support
- D-shell (15-pin) VGA connector
- Register compatible with VGA
- DVI-I
- TV out Module enabling big-screen gaming,
digital timeshifting VCR, and video-editing applications
Features
- nfiniteFX II Engine
- Accuview Antialiasing
- Lightspeed Memory Architecture II
- 3D Textures
- Shadow Buffers
- High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
- Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
- AGP 4X/2X and AGP Texturing Support
- Dual Vertex Shaders
- Highest Quality and Highest Performance Microsoft Windows
XP Support
- Lossless Z-Compression
- Microsoft DirectX 8.X and OpenGL 1.3 Optimizations and
Support
Quad Cache
- TV-Out and Video Modules
- World's Fastest DDR Memory Interface
- Z-Correct Bump Mapping
Warranty
Retail
Bundle
Retails
packages include...
- Manual
- S-Video
Cable
- XFX
Driver CD
- PowerDVD XP 4.0
- Trial Versions of "Dronez" and "Gunlok"
Games
And
for the specifics of the XFX GeForce4 Ti4400 against some other cards...
| |
Core
Clock / RAM MHz |
Memory
Bandwidth |
Fill
rate Mpixels/sec |
Triangles
per second |
Asus GeForce2 GTS
|
200
/ 333 |
5.3
GB/s |
800 |
25
Million |
GeForce3 Ti500
|
240
/ 500 |
8.0
GB/s |
960 |
40
Million |
GeForce4 MX420
|
250
/ 332 |
2.7
GB/s |
1000 |
31
Million |
| XFX
GeForce4 Ti4400 |
275
/ 555 |
8.8
GB/s |
1100 |
131
Million* |
* Verticals Per Second
We
rolled out the Momma-system for this one...
Test System Specifications:
- AMD 1800+XP Processor
- ABIT KR7A Motherboard
- 512 MB RAM
- Windows XP
- DirectX 8.1
- nVidia detonator drivers, version 28.32
We used the following benchmarking utilities to the fullest:
- 3D Mark 2001 SE
- Vulpine GLmark
- Comanche 4 Benchmark Demo
- nVidia Chameleon Benchmark Utility
- Quake III
(32-bit color, everything maxed out)
The scores around the board were pretty amazing...there's no doubt that
XFX packed in the power with this video card!
3DMark2001 SE SCORES
3DMark2001
SE is the latest installment in the popular 3DMark series. By combining
DirectX8.1 support with completely new graphics, it continues to provide
benchmark results to make informed hardware assessments. This is probably
the most popular benchmarking program out there, and for good reason. Anyway,
the results...
Show me the numbers...
| |
3DMark
Score |
GeForce3
Ti500
|
8135 |
GeForce4
MX420
|
3900 |
XFX
GeForce4 Ti4400
|
8992 |
As you can plainly see the the XFX Ti4400 is one hell of a performer. The
GeForce4 MX420 isn't even close to one-half the performance that the Ti4400
is! So I guess the old adage is true - you get what you pay for. Even though
the Ti4400 might come with a bit of a price tag (again, $299 MSRP, but if
you can find a good retailer, you'll find it below that number), consumers
are definitely getting what they pay for.
Comanche 4 Benchmark Demo
Next we ran through the popular Comanche 4 Benchmark Demo. We ran through
three different runs, on 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024 resolution levels.
The Benchmark demo is a DirectX 8.1 benchmark that represents a real-world
gaming experience. It measures a given system's performance in frames per
second and Tris per second (more is better).
| |
800x600 |
1024x768 |
1280x1024 |
| XFX
GF4 4400 |
32.34
FPS /
6.441M Tris Per Sec |
32.02
FPS /
6.377M Tris Per Sec |
31.99
FPS /
6.373M Tris Per Sec |
| GeForce4
MX420 |
26.51
FPS /
5.250M Tris Per Sec |
22.23
FPS /
4.403M Tris Per Sec |
16.03
FPS /
3.174M Tris Per Sec |
As
you can see in this real world gaming test of a Direct X 8.1 environment,
the XFX GeForce4 Ti4400 outperforms its counterpart. Most notably impressive
about this benchmark is the absolute teeny-tiny and almost insignificant
level-off of frame-rate degradation between resolutions in the XFX Ti4400.
From 800x600 to 1024x768 we're looking at a ONE PERCENT difference
- simply amazing. And the drop off from 1024x768 to 1280x1024? It's a
minuscule .09%!! Basically this means in a "real world"
test of a DirectX 8.1 game, you can juice up the graphics as high as they
will go and not worry about performance degradation! How cool is that?
Basically this showed us that this card can be seriously taken to the
limits and not be slowed down. Cards that kick ass indeed!!
Vulpine
GLmark Test
While
MadOnion (creators of 3D Mark 2001SE) specializes in DirectX benchmarks,
Vulpine has chosen to build its GLMark software package upon the powerful
OpenGL platform. The base rendering routine is a custom version of Vulpine's
next-generation game engine known as Vision. We've used this benchmark
before, as we're seeing it used more and more across the net. While a
current generation video card is recommended, this benchmark only requires
an OpenGL card with true ARB_mutlitexturing support according to the minimum
specifications. This means most cards produced since the original nVidia
TNT or 3dfx Voodoo3 should be capable of running GLMark, though do not
expect anything more than a few frames per second with such dated video
chipsets. We set the Vulpine GLMark test to an 1024x768 resolution level.
Results of the XFX GeForce4 Ti4400 tests @ 1024x768...
Holy crap!
The Ti4400 blew away the the Vulpine tests. For a comparison, we had tested
the MX420 using this tests before on this same system and the Average
FPS was 23.9! I know I might be comparing apples and oranges, but at least
this shows you the raw power of this card.
On
to Page 2 / 2 - More Benchmarks, Real World Results, Overclocking, and
Final Results!
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