LOSTCIRCUITS

Conclusion

The first conclusion we have is about the ASUS V9280S. ASUS boldly claims up to 20% performance increase over any standard GeForce 4 Ti 4200 and, aside from the issue that the gains are application dependent, we have no problems with that, in fact, in ViewPERF Data Explorer (DX-07) we see almost doubling of performance. Other applications show considerably less but by and large the claims are more than justified. All in all, with its 8 layer PCB and 128 MB local frame buffer, the V9280S is a must consideration for anyone in the market for a Ti 4200 card, regardless of 4X or 8X considerations. Added goodies as the video editing tools and games make the V9280S even more attractive.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Not only a line from "Field Of DRAMs" but in many ways the doctrine governing the progress in the computer industry or Hi-Tech industry in general, it means that there is always a see saw or pendulum effect between the invention of hardware and the conception of software that will take advantage of the new hardware capabilities. Only that in the case of certain graphics capabilities, we are still waiting and waiting and probably will be waiting some more. Remember Treemark and the excitement when some three years ago nothing was ever going to be the same as before. Aside from demos, preciously little has happened to bring the then advertised richness of graphics experience to the gaming platforms, Comanche4 still looks like something that could be played on a RageII Pro (at 4 fps, though).

Being spoiled by the latest and greatest achievements in PC technology, it is very easy to forget that there is only a small group of users that really has access to even a card like the GeForce 4 Ti 4200. Many users have to content themselves with far less and all those users still have to be served by the game developers industry. This legacy, in conjunction with antiquated game engines and the enormous amount of work it takes to create new applications are amongst the factors why we are not looking at cinematic game experiences yet. In other words, games have to be written such that they will comply with minimum requirements otherwise, we would see reiterations of "Trespasser" all over again.

There is still hope, though, and there are the high end applications like 3DSMax and other more professional software from Discreet amongst others. Those applications will act as groundbreakers for the gaming industry and we will see utilization of higher polygon and triangle counts in the near future, DOOM3 is just one example and even though we have no hard benchmarks yet to show, we can say that it beats heavily on the graphics cards and interface.

Final conclusion of this review is that AGP 8X does offer some performance increase, however, it is not where we originally expected it to be. We believe that this shift of gain is caused largely by software optimizations to work best with the current (or not so current) standards including texture compression algorithms which makes it difficult to document the real performance increase. However, it is very clear that the next step towards cinematic quality will need higher AGP bandwidth, whether that means that we will finally use AGP 4X or even AGP 8X is up to those that write game code. Also, we would like to point out that most current software is simply inadequate when it comes to challenging the AGP rate. In most D3D applications, therefore, AGP2X still suffices but it is time for a change. The gaming community is ready and so is the hardware.

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