NVIDIA GeForce4 - NV17 and NV25 Come to Life

Memory Controller & Occlusion Culling Performance - VillageMark

VillageMark is a benchmark that was developed by PowerVR to show off the benefits of their tile rendering architecture which you may be most familiar with from the Kyro II card. Based on a tile or deferred rendering architecture, the Kyro II's core had the unique capability of not rendering any pixels that wouldn't be seen by the user. The VillageMark test has an incredible amount of overdraw (where the engine instructs the graphics unit to draw a large number of pixels that will never be seen) in order to stress the importance of features such as z-occlusion culling and other memory bandwidth optimization techniques.

While none of the architectures we're comparing today can be classified as deferred renderers, they do have some very advanced techniques borrowed from the deferred rendering world and thus VillageMark becomes a great benchmark of them. This way we can find out exactly how much of an improvement NVIDIA's LMA II is over the original Lightning Memory Architecture.

VillageMark NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 NVIDIA GeForce4 240/500 ATI Radeon 8500 ATI Radeon 8500LE NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce3 NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 118 107 94 92 83 75 63 53 43 37 37 | 0 | 24 | 47 | 71 | 94 | 118 | 142

The first thing that should be mentioned is that the latest drivers from ATI resulted in a bit of a performance drop here. Normally the Radeon 8500 comes out with a 113 fps score, but with the latest drivers the score is pegged at 92 fps. Using the latest drivers fixed some significant bugs in one of the games we used to benchmark and thus we stuck with the latest drivers for this review.

Comparing clock for clock the GeForce4 to the GeForce3 Ti 500, both running at 240/500, we can see that there is definitely a significant improvement in the GeForce4's Z-occlusion culling algorithms. While the improvement isn't the 50% that NVIDIA is boasting, the 25% improvement that can be seen here is impressive none the less. The increased clock speed of the shipping GeForce4 boards make the improvement all that more noticeable.

The GeForce4's LMA II is clearly more than just a new marketing term.