NVIDIA GeForce4 - NV17 and NV25 Come to Life

Synthetic DirectX 8 Performance - 3DMark 2001

Next we'll take a look at some theoretical numbers from 3DMark 2001 in order to make any predictions about the performance of the contenders overall.

We can already see that the GeForce4s are coming off to a strong start and the GeForce4, when clocked at 240/500 (the same speed as the GeForce3 Ti 500), is already significantly faster than its equivalently clocked predecessor. This is again strong proof that the architectural improvements in the GeForce4 are significant enough to warrant the name change. Looking at the vertex shader performance alone, the performance going from a GeForce3 Ti 500 to a GeForce4 clocked at the same 240/500 speed is an increase of 46% courtesy of the dual vertex shaders in the GeForce4. Interestingly enough, the Radeon 8500 vertex shader unit still manages to perform quite well only being defeated by the GeForce4 Ti 4400 in vertex shader performance.

Polygon throughput has also improved tremendously with the GeForce4 which should help next-generation games such as Unreal Tournament II and Unreal 2 which we will attempt to characterize later on with the Unreal Performance Test 2002.

Do take note of the tests that the GeForce4 MX could not complete because of its lack of full DX8 compliance.