GPU Shootout with Unreal Tournament 2003 Part II: CPU Scaling

NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Line

The following GPUs are featured in the charts below:

GeForce4 Ti 4600
GeForce4 Ti 4400
GeForce4 Ti 4200
GeForce4 MX 460
GeForce4 MX 440

The first thing you’ll notice is that the GeForce4 MX’s curves remain perfectly flat.  A faster CPU doesn’t help the performance of the NV17 GPU at all; this puppy is fill-rate limited courtesy of its 2 pixel pipelines.  There’s a lot of multipass rendering going on with the GeForce4 MX that guarantees a flat CPU scaling curve.

The true GeForce4 cards exhibit a remarkably different pattern as they demand higher speed CPUs to unlock their potential.  With a slow enough CPU you’d be getting more for your money if you went with a GeForce4 MX than a GeForce4.

Taking down the detail settings results in the MX cards scaling much more like the GeForce4s.