Ever since the inception of the original GeForce3 VisionTek has been one of the prime Nvidia based graphics card manufactures. Excellent ties with Nvidia allows them to be one of, if not the, first manufacturer to offer cards based on Nvidia?s newest chipset. This in addition to the fact that they work alongside Nvidia in the creation of reference boards it?s no doubt that VisionTek would easily be the first to offer any new cards based on Nvidia?s new chipsets, and at a reasonable price while doing it. This has propelled Nvidia to one of the top positions in the video card industry in a relatively short time.

One thing VisionTek is not known for however is offering a generous software bundle. Being able to offer the prices and quick production time that Visiontek does calls for certain sacrifices to be made. There are no games to be found included anywhere in the GeForce4 series nor are there any cool hardware monitoring utilities. All that is included with VisionTek?s Ti4400 is Cyberlink?s PowerDVD XP. The Ti4600 board is a little more charitable in that it offers PowerDVD XP as well as a stripped down version of Cyberlink?s Power Director 2.0 to go along with the VIVO capabilities of the card. VisionTek does also include a number of the Nvidia tech demos on their driver CD as well as a nice little video of a man installing an AGP graphics board.

GeForce4 Technology

I?ll try to keep the overall technology portion to a minimum as I?m sure most of you have already read most of this stuff thousands of times ;)

nfiniteFX II Engine

First and foremost Nvidia has updated the nfiniteFX Engine from the original GeForce3 and added support for a second vertex shader. The nfiniteFX II Engine as it is now called supports two vertex shaders and one pixel shader. Adding a second vertex shader was an excellent move by Nvidia as it should drastically effect games that support vertex shaders, almost doubling their performance. This in addition to advanced pixel shaders and Z-correct bump mapping should allow the GeForce4 to obtain the visual quality crown from ATI.

Lightspeed Memory Architecture II

Simply an upgrade from the GeForce3's memory controller Lightspeed Memory Architecture II now supports 128MB of high speed BGA RAM in addition to a crossbar style memory controller which helps to keep everything in balance. This in addition to a number of other technologies ensures that everything runs silky smooth in terms of memory bandwidth.