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Installation
Hardware installation is no easier and
no harder than it would be with any other graphics
card you can buy other than you'll need a spare 4
pin Molex from your power supply and you'll need it
to reach your card.
Installing NVIDIA's drivers has, with
one or two minor exceptions, always been a simple
task. They unusually install in a single, simple operation
and work without any swearing or fiddling which is
a major plus to me, I have better things to do than
mess about trying to decode randomly generated error
messages.
Before I get on to the testing, and
to avoid any of the wonderfully detailed emails I
received after my last review from people who hadn't
got the grasp of the driver settings I'd adopted,
let's go over them.
Driver Settings
First the Mipmap detail level (below).
This was set for "Best Image Quality" and
it stayed there throughout. I don't like the image
that's rendered with this set to "Best Performance",
not only because it's ugly but also because it has
no comparable setting in the competitor's drivers
so far as I can see. To those who say the difference
in image quality is minimal in all cases I say wipe
the Arctic Silver off your spectacles and take another
look!
The appearance of the "More Direct3D"
button is due to the addition of "Coolbits"
to the registry which allows V-Sync to be set, a feature
that really should be part of the default drivers
by now.
Self explanatory? Bottom two sliders
were adjusted as required while the top one stayed
put.
In both OpenGL and Direct3D V-Sync is
always set to "Off".
Okay, so what I'm saying is you might see better
figures than this if a site uses the "Best Performance"
Mipmap detail level but in a lot of cases the performance
increases isn't great. Unfortunately in some cases
(like in Unreal Tournament) the difference can also
be fairly substantial.
Test Setup
Every other review has put the 5600 Ultra up against
a Radeon 9500 or 9600 so while I didn't have one here
(jeez will nobody work with us :) I eventually decided
not to get one in just for the sake of this review.
Not only does this save all the driver speculation
it also gives us chance to see how the FX fits in
to the NVIDIA range that preceded it.
We figured it was a bit unfair to run a midrange
card on a Barton 3200+ or P4 3.0 so we packed them
away and dug out a trusty AthlonXP 2200+. Also back
in the drawer went the dual channel nForce2 board
and in its place we bolted in a KT400 powered Albatron
KX400-8X. For the Ti4200 part we chose one of the
breed of "super cards" from Albatron that
was built on a Ti4600 PCB with faster memory onboard.
The other specs looked like this:
256MB Corsair XMS3200
Maxtor 80GB HDD (7200RPM, ATA-133)
GeForce4 Ti4600 (reference)
Albatron GeForce4 Ti4200P-Turbo (250/550 core/memory)
To the benchmarks:
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