VIA MVP4 Chipset

• AMD K6-2 300 (3DNow! support was disabled)

• FIC PA-2013 w/ 1MB L2 Cache (MVP3), Prototype MVP4 board w/ 1MB L2 Cache

• 128MB PC100 SDRAM

• Western Digital Caviar AC35100 - UltraATA

• Canopus Spectra 2500 TNT AGP Video Card (16MB - MVP3 benchmarks)
• Integrated Trident Blade 3D (8MB - MVP4 benchmarks)

All Winstone tests were run at 1024 x 768 x 16 bit color

All Final Reality tests were conducted at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit color and were run using version Final
Reality 1.01

All 3Dmark tests were conducted at 800 x 600 x 32-bit color, triple buffered, using 16 bit Z-buffering

As you can tell, the business performance of the MVP4 chipset is virtually identical to that of the MVP3, the only difference being that the slower Trident video core present on the MVP4 is no match for the TNT used in the MVP3 test system. Likewise, the price of the MVP3 system outfitted with a TNT card is no match for the price of the MVP4 system, with the only performance difference from a business perspective being a few percent in favor of the MVP3. How much is 5% worth to you?

Here's the perfect illustration of why the MVP4 is not a gamer's solution, the Trident core is simply not a full AGP implementation, meaning that once its frame buffer is exceeded (in this case, 8MB) there is a significant drop in performance as there is a considerable amount of texture swapping to and from the system memory, an extremely slow route, even for a video accelerator that is integrated into the chipset on a motherboard.