NVIDIA GeForce4 4200 Go: Bringing mobile gaming to new heights

Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby

Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby 800x600x32 Desktop GeForce4 Ti 4200 GeForce4 4200 Go Mobility Radeon 9000 Desktop GeForce4 MX 440 147.6 137.0 106.4 104.8 | 0 | 30 | 59 | 89 | 118 | 148 | 177

Right off the bat we can see that the GeForce4 4200 Go brings mobile gaming to places it has never been before. If we recall the incremental gains that the Mobility Radeon 9000 offered over the GeForce4 440 Go (top dog when the Mobility Radeon 9000 was released), we can see that the performance that the GeForce4 4200 Go offers is nothing less than stunning. The GeForce4 4200 Go outperforms the Mobility Radeon 9000, the prior king of the hill, by an impressive 29%. In fact, at 800x600x32 the performance of the mobile GeForce4 440 Go is only 8% off the performance of the high performing desktop GeForce4 Ti 4200 (which should be identical in speed to the GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP 8x).

Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby 1024x768x32 Desktop GeForce4 Ti 4200 GeForce4 4200 Go Desktop GeForce4 MX 440 Mobility Radeon 9000 130.3 106.6 73.2 71.9 | 0 | 26 | 52 | 78 | 104 | 130 | 156

Bumping the resolution up to 1024x768x32 in Unreal Tournament 2003 still shows the GeForce4 4200 Go at the head of the mobile pack. The lead rises to a massive 46% boost over the Mobility Radeon 9000. The performance of the GeForce4 4200 Go drops relative to the desktop GeForce4 Ti 4200 as this time around the cards are separated by 22%. The increasing performance delta between the desktop and mobile part can be attributed to the additional stress placed on the GPU at higher resolutions. Whereas at 800x600x32 both the GeForce4 Ti 4200 and the GeForce4 4200 Go were somewhat CPU bound, they become video card bound at these higher resolutions.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby 1280x960x32 Desktop GeForce4 Ti 4200 GeForce4 4200 Go Desktop GeForce4 MX 440 Mobility Radeon 9000 96.9 69.8 50.6 46.4 | 0 | 19 | 39 | 58 | 78 | 97 | 12

Boosting the resolution of Unreal Tournament 2003 up to 1280x960x32 still paints the GeForce4 4200 Go in good light. The chip, running at its full clock speed, is able to outperform the Mobility Radeon 9000 in its top configuration by 38%. Again the gap between the mobile chip and the desktop one running at a higher memory and core speed grows, this time amounting to 39%. Like in other resolutions, the GeForce4 4200 Go also has no problem what so ever beating out the desktop GeForce4 440.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby 1600x1200x32 Desktop GeForce4 Ti 4200 GeForce4 4200 Go Desktop GeForce4 MX 440 Mobility Radeon 9000 65.1 49.3 34.0 33.2 | 0 | 13 | 26 | 39 | 52 | 65 | 78

The GeForce4 4200 Go certainly makes a statement in Unreal Tournament 2003 when at 1600x1200x32. Even in today's most stressful gaming environment the chip is able to run at reasonable speeds at this high resolution. The flagship NVIDIA mobile product outperforms the flagship ATI one by 45%. With the GeForce4 4200 Go long gone are the days where subsequent mobile products only increases performance marginally. The speed that the GeForce4 4200 Go offers over the Mobility Radeon 9000 in Unreal Tournament 2003 is not trivial in any sense of the word.