Technical Specification
Here's some detailed technical information on the Creative Ti 4600.
Specification• Dual programmable Vertex Shaders
• Advanced programmable Pixel Shaders
• nVIDIA Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ II
• nVIDIA Accuview™ Antialiasing
• 3D Textures
• Shadow Buffers
• 4 dual-rendering pipelines
• 8 texels per clock cycle
• Dual cube environment mapping
• 128MB high-speed DDR RAM memory at 660MHz DDR
• High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
• AGP 4X with Fast Writes
• AGP 4X / 2X and AGP Texturing support
• 32-bit color with 32-bit Z/stencil buffer
• Z-correct true, reflective bump mapping
• High-performance 2D rendering engine
• Hardware accelerated real-time shadows
• True-color hardware cursor
• Integrated hardware transform and lighting engine
• High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
• TV-Out and Video Modules
• Multibuffering (double, triple, quad) for smooth animation and video playback
• Microsoft DirectX® and S3TC® texture compression
• 10.4 GB/sec. memory bandwidth
• 125 million triangles/sec. setup engine
• 4.8 billion AA sample/sec. fill rate
• 1.23 trillion operations/sec.
A quick inspection of the detailed specification shows us that we are dealing with some big numbers with this video card. The Creative Ti 4600 uses a brute strength, coupled with a little cunning, approach. We see that it boasts an incredible 10.4GB/s of memory bandwidth, bandwidth that is put to excellent use by the improved Lightspeed Memory Architecture. 128 MB of video RAM is the highest we've seen in the consumer market. It should allow developers to use larger, more life-like textures in the future. The vastly upgraded anti-aliasing logic should be able to effectively harness the almost 5 billion AA samples per second that the Ti 4600 can produce at stock speeds.
Before embarking on our gamut of benchmarks, I would like to touch upon something that is extremely important to me in a video card, namely 2D quality. This may sound a little strange in a review dedicated to the most powerful 3D accelerator ever seen on a consumer level, but it does hold special interest for me. My previous card, the Leadtek Geforce3 Ti 500, was chosen as much for its 2D ability as anything else. nVidia has historically played second fiddle to ATI and especially Matrox in the 2D quality stakes. I'm extremely happy to report that the Creative Ti 4600, much like the reference Ti 4600, is excellent at all things 2D.
I use a relatively high-end monitor in the Sony G500 21" flatscreen. The text and images produced by the Creative are subjectively excellent at my regular resolution of 1600x1200x32 85Hz. Even raising the resolution to 2048x1536x32 incurred little loss in focus. I've previously owned an ATI Radeon 8500, and feel that the Creative Ti 4600 is at least as good as, if not better than, the R8500 at all things 2D related. Kudos to nVidia and Creative for making this reviewer happy in that respect.
We also experimented briefly with nView, nVidia's dual display support program. It shares many common features with ATI's Hydravision, hardly surprising as Appian, the company behind Hydravision, was hired by nVidia for nView development. nView was a doddle to use, a step-by-step wizard guided us effortlessly into the realm of dual displays.
From a pure hardware point of view, Creative and nVidia are on to a winner, let's now see if the promise can be realised in our benchmarks.
