Both HardOCP and FiringSquad have taken a look at the upcoming GeForce 4 Ti4200, the cheapest of the "real" GeForce 4 cards. The question is, can you overclock this card to Ti4600 speeds? It certainly gets close.

Nvidia announced that some of Verant's upcoming games will be among the first to be GeForce 4 optimized. Looks like we should have some sweet visuals in Star Wars Galaxies. Thanks Mike Butler.

NVidia has released some new Detonator XP drivers for all their videocards. You can grab them for Windows XP/2000, Win9x or Windows NT. They are all around 8mb.

Here's one that will get you wondering. According to this patent application (Got the link from /.) the folks at NVidia are trying to patent what amounts to matching game players up together on a website and creating stats for the players. It seems like this would get in the way of all kinds of existing services. From places like MS Zone to the guys who run stats on their Counter-Strike servers.

A multiplayer game system is implemented over the WWW using a plurality of game servers dynamically linked to and controlled by a WWW server. The WWW server dynamically links game players who log on to a web site hosted by the WWW server as a function of game playing statistics for each game player which are stored in the WWW server.
[snip]
The system described relates to a method and apparatus for playing a video game among a plurality of players over a wide area network (WAN), such as the Internet, and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for screening the players by means of personal game statistics.

The patent was filed in August of 1999. Any ideas on why in the world NVidia would even bother with something like this? What could possibly be the point?

Nvidia today announced that GeForce 4 cards are now hitting retail stores. Though MX cards have been out for a while, the Ti4600 and 4400 GPU cards are now following.

VIA Arena has a new AGP driver for those of us with VIA chipset motherboards. This one should marginally improve performance.

News from the German expo CeBit, where NVidia is showing their products. More nForce products are on the way, as NVidia is demoing the nForce 620-D and nForce 615-D chipsets running DDR333 memory. DDR400 support is being demonstrated as well. Motherboards using the new chipsets will be available late in Q2 of this year. Thanks James.

There's an NVidia interview in SimHQ, which has Steve Sims and Brian Burke answering "We can not talk about unannounced products" to a lot of questions. Though they do talk a bit about the AA solution on the current NVidia cards.

HardOCP has posted some news about the cancelled GeForce 4 orders by Best Buy which I'm sure we can all remember. Apparently the Ohio Attorney General's Office is interested in looking into the mess up by Best Buy, and see what can be done in the future to prevent these kind of "mistakes". If you live in Ohio and got your order cancelled, you might wanna head over to HardOCP to find out more.

Still have an older Pentium 3? Wondering if the GeForce 4 will offer you any performance over the GeForce3? Then maybe this FiringSquad article is of interest. They benchmarked the GeForce 4 MX and Ti cards as well as GeForce 3 Ti and MX and GeForce2 cards on a Pentium 3 700mhz and 1.0Ghz.

From the "crazy rumors" department comes news from The Inquirer, where they are reporting about Microsoft's plans for the Xbox 2 (already?). Supposedly NVidia won't be part of it. Instead ATI and VIA will be trying to score the contract for the graphics chip. VIA is supposedly also in the race to provide the chipset and CPU. Uh huh. Thanks Chris.

Y'know what the problem is? Nvidia charges Microsoft just a little bit too much for its technology and Microsoft wants to lose just that little bit less on each X-Box it sells. More. While Via reckons it could scoop the opposition and get the graphics chipset and the CPU business, it has one major competitor in the final running and that happens to be little Canadian company ATI.

According to this press release on MSNBC, NVidia has purchased an Axis Xtreme acceleration/emulation system. What the hell is that? Basically, NVidia will be able to verify designs of new chipsets much quicker and so they can speed up the time from design to production. Thanks V0lk.

Nvidia shares down today, as the the company will be the subject of a federal accounting investigation. The company's stock was the best performer in the Standard & Poors 500 list in 2001, but so was Enron in 2000. And we know what happened to Enron. Of course it's not expected that NVidia is doing the same creative accounting as Enron was, but SEC is still gonna look at the results of a few recent quarters. Yesterday NVidia announced another great quarter. Thanks HomeLan Federation.

In November, Nvidia was hit by news of an inquiry into alleged insider trading by company employees. The latest SEC probe stemmed from the commission's review of e-mail messages Nvidia had provided as part of the insider trading inquiry. On Thursday, Nvidia said the SEC was looking into the timing of up to $3.6 million in product costs recorded in the second and third quarters of its 2001 fiscal year. In addition, the company said the SEC was examining the recording of reserves in the fourth quarter of its 2000 fiscal year should and the first quarter of its fiscal 2001 year. Nvidia's fiscal 2001 year ended in January 2001.

If you were wondering about the performance of a GeForce 4 in the new 3DMark, NVNews has some scores. In 1024x768 with no antialiasing, a GeForce4 Ti 4600 scores almost 10,000 points on an Athlon XP 1800+.

Computer and Video Games has posted an interview with Dan Vivoli of NVidia about the GeForce4. Specifically they ask about why we should pay the money to get a GeForce 4 and when we can expect to see games that actually use the features.

C&VG: An issue for the consumer is the price of the boards. Many of the latest GeForce 4 cards cost more than the price of a games console such as PS2 and Xbox...
Dan:Some of them do...

CVG: ... where most of the games look stunning. How do you justify to gamers spending that amount of money on a card when the PC games just won't use anywhere near all the features?
Dan:I think that the way to think about it is that the fundamental difference between a game console and a PC is that a game console technology is fixed. Xbox is Xbox. They're not going to change the graphics until Xbox 2. PlayStation 2 is not going to change the graphics until PlayStation 3. They're about 4 or 5 years away. The PC, on the other hand, you can upgrade the graphics every six months... ...

The first GeForce 4 articles are hitting the net, though NVidia still hasn't officially announced the chipset (ok they have now). Right now there are articles at Tech-Report and HardOCP (which includes benchmarks) though suffice to say there will be more this morning.
So is NVidia's latest a winner? Sure its faster but again there are no games using its features much like with the GeForce 3. However it looks like you can crank up that anti aliasing since that got a whole lot faster. To check a benchmark from Kyle, where a GeForce 3 Ti-500 scored 31fps in a 1600x1200 Quake 3 demo with 2xAA, the GeForce 4 Ti-4600 gets 72fps. Not bad at all.

GeForce4 Ti cards will come in several flavors. The GF4 Ti 4600 will feature 128MB of memory and the aforementioned 300/325MHz core/memory clock speed. At these speeds, the Ti 4600 cards will be unquestionably faster, in terms of fill rate, than ATI's top-end Radeon 8500.
<snip>
Here are the things NVIDIA is going to want you to pay attention to:
- Most powerful GPU in the universe – 10.4GB & 136M vertices per second of graphics processing power.
- Accuview AA – Delivers unbeatable visual quality and frame rates.
- nfiniteFX II – Engine drives complex geometry and animation.
- nView – Display technology provides the ultimate multiple display flexibility and user control.

I'll keep this story updated with more articles as they come in.
Update: More at AnandTech (with Unreal Performance Test 2002 benchmarks), NV News, GameSpy, Hot Hardware, 3D Blaster 4 MX420 review, Guru 3D.

Update 2 Here is the official PR on the GeForce 4. The MX boards will be out in the next two weeks, Ti boards in about a month.

There's a press event going on in San Francisco where NVidia is officially unveiling the GeForce 4. News Factor managed to get the first few details online (without breaking any NDAs that is). As we already knew there will be a regular as well as a MX version, but News Factor also mentions the new Accuview and nVIEW features. Nvidia should be issuing a press release with more info about their latest chipset tomorrow.

Among the biggest improvements is the addition of "Accuview," a new hardware technology that will offer peak frame rates of 60 frames per second or higher for 3D graphics at any resolution, Perez said, adding that the feature keeps graphics in the "sweet spot" of frame rates.
The GeForce4 processors also will feature a new display technology called "nVIEW" that will allow multi-monitor display on as many as 16 different screens at the same time, Perez said.
Other features include new user controls that allow changing of desktops and a memory architecture that delivers 128-bit double data rate (DDR).

The NVidia folks have been having all kinds of fun with the pending GeForce4 release. You can read a couple of articles on Yahoo and CNN about how different places have been leaking info. Here's another PR mentioning 2.6ns memory.

The new top of the range ELSA GLADIAC 925VIVO is based on NVIDIA’s new GeForce4™ Ti 4600 GPU. Equipped with a 128-MB DDR SDRAM, 2.6 ns access time and a 650MHz effective memory clock, the ELSA GLADIAC 925VIVO is aimed at extreme gamers and multimedia fans looking for state-of-the-art 3D performance.

That would make it fast. However it's also important to note that the GeForce4 MX that is shipping with the Apple machines is basically as powerful as a GeForce2. It's based on the NV17 core as opposed to the NV25 core that the higher end GeForce4 cards are (Andy's explanation here).

Will the GeForce4 be good? I'm thinking so. The GeForce3 didnt really thrill people a hell of a lot except for running higher resolutions, it was a nice little improvement but not a big reason to upgrade. The GeForce4 might be though.

A French distributor who will be selling GeForce4 cards has leaked out the info on the GeForce4 a bit early. The official launch date for the GeForce4 is planned for early next month. Here's some stuff from ZDNet:

The MX 460 core is said to run at 300MHz, with DDR SDRAM at 275MHz. Meanwhile the MX 440 will include a 275MHz GPU and 200MHz DDR memory, and the MX 420 will use a 250MHz core and 166MHz memory, according to reports. (All use DDR memory, which effectively doubles the memory speed.) The Ti 4600 is to support 8x AGP, with a 300MHz core and 350MHz memory, while the 4400 supports 4x AGP, with a 275MHz core and 300MHz memory, reports said. Both cards include 128MB of DDR SDRAM. AGP is a bus included in many newer PCs that can be accelerated by the graphics card.

Hey look a bunch of numbers? Well it should be faster or something.

AnandTech has a nice article, explaining what DVI is all about and why it is good. It also shows you a warranty-voiding way of improving image quality on NVIDIA cards by removing the low-pass filters.