It was less than a year ago that Nvidia introduced us to the first fully hardware-programmable graphics card -- the GeForce3. Six months later, Nvidia faced a real competitor in the form of ATI's Radeon 8500. Today, Nvidia announced two designs based around its new GeForce4 architecture, the GeForce4 Ti 4600 and the GeForce4 MX 460.

TechTV Labs was given the chance to preview Nvidia's latest reference designs and put them through some of our favorite benchmarks. While quality software that takes advantage of the advanced features found in the aforementioned video cards is scarce at best, this year is shaping up to finally deliver some titles that may prove the investment worthwhile.

The new stuff

The new GeForce4 Ti 4600 offers improvements in nearly every area when compared to the original GeForce3. The new flagship packs 128MB of Ball Grid Array (BGA) DDR memory chips running at speeds in excess of 325 MHz (650 MHz effective). The Ti 4600's 300-MHz graphics core is now covered by a single fan/heatsink device, leaving the memory chips bare. Internally dubbed the "superfan," this compact device blows air across the face of the card and over the efficient BGA memory chips, carrying heat away.

The most striking thing about the BGA memory chips (aside from their blistering clock speeds) is their tiny size. The BGA DDR chips used on the GeForce4 are half the size of previous memory chips used on Nvidia products. Running at 325 MHz (650 MHz), the GeForce4 Ti 4600 offers 10.4GB per second of memory bandwidth -- over 3GB per second faster than the original GeForce3. In the case of video cards, memory bandwidth is a primary factor in 3D performance at higher resolutions.

The GeForce4 MX 460 features half the memory of the Ti 4600, as well as some reduced hardware functionality. Running with a slower core and memory, The GF4 MX 460 is being targeted toward users seeking a good value. While both cards share a similar first name, the GF4 MX 460 actually performed slower than the original GeForce3 -- more on this in a bit.

Other enhancements featured in the GeForce4 series include an updated memory architecture and an improved graphics engine, dubbed nfiniteFX II. Nvidia claims the nfiniteFX II engine in the GeForce4 Ti 4600 has three times the geometry power of the GeForce3 and even outclasses Microsoft's powerful Xbox gaming console.

Nvidia also has introduced a feature into the GeForce4 series that was curiously absent from the GeForce3 -- support for dual displays.