One of Nvidia's most Controversial GPU

the g-force for MX was maybe nvidia's first PR or marketing disaster it had nothing to do with the GeForce 4 it performed slower than the GeForce 3 and it was built on GeForce 2 technology many customers felt really disappointed and misled financially for NVIDIA it was a huge success it allowed them to have a G-Force 4 product at every price level ready to go and you could pick them up at retail but they also came shipped already installed in many pre-built PCS and that's the reason that to this day you will find these cards quite easily on the used market prices should not be too outrageous now for Windows XP gaming if you want to play like Doom 3 fear of Far Cry they are really not good enough you should look elsewhere but what about Windows 98 they could have the right company nation of performance compatibility availability and pricing so that's what we will find out in this video calling it a GeForce 2 plus or GeForce 2 super that would have been more appropriate it has the same dark deck 7 features but with improved efficiency at the same clock speed we have added features like dual monitor support there was Hardware accelerated DVD playback and better anti-aliasing Nvidia was also counting on developers including different render paths so if you had a direct X7 GPU you would get lesser Graphics not as detailed but at least the game would run at the performance was not that bad it was only later that people really noticed when games started to exclusively support Target X8 with the GeForce 4 MX card you would get an error message that this video card is not sufficient another factor is which model of GeForce 4mx do you have F here are three versions and they're all totally different let's start with this one here you should avoid this model this has a 64-bit memory interface that means the memory bandwidth is cut in half and performance is reduced stay away from the 420 models and the mx4000 as well anything ending with se you really want to have a 128 bit memory interface like this card this is the mx440 and it does mention here the 128 bit memory interface this card will perform much better meaning you can play games at higher resolutions with more details if you're lucky try to find this one this is the mx460 the high-end version this is a model from Asus and this is the card that we're going to use in this video to do all the Benchmark results and gameplay what I like about this card is it is passing actively cooled no fan no moving Parts it means more reliable and no noise we only have a VGA output here some cards have DVI we also get S-Video and compose it out to connect to an old school TV we have an Hep interface and it is 4X AGP this mx460 has a GPU clock speed of 300 megahertz 64 megabytes of memory DDR with a 128 bit memory interface clock speed is 277 megahertz with a transfer rate of 544 Mega transfers and here we have the model number this is the main board we're using it is from gigabyte the ga k8vm 800m socket 754 we have two DDR slots we have two ID ports floppy Port ATP 8 interface three PCI slots here socket 754 and the chipset is from via the processor we're using today is the AMD Athlon it is the 3400 plus 512 megabytes of ddr400 memory for sound we're using the creative Labs Sound Blaster live model number CT 4830 for storage a 32 gigabyte SATA SSD from SanDisk together with the star tech ID to SATA adapter I ran a tto disk Benchmark to measure the performance of storage and it's excellent we're getting around 100 megabytes per second reading at around 80 megabytes per second writing to boot the system from a floppy image we're using the gotek USB floppy emulator the u-green USB to SATA adapter that lets me transfer all the games the windows files the benchmarks the drivers onto the SSD from my modern desktop in terms of software installation I'm following the same process with most of my machines I'm loading the bias defaults and then I'm disabling any resources that we're not using like ethernet the onboard audio the serial the parallel ports USB 2 and so on then I'm installing Windows 98 SE followed by the Via chipset drivers they automatically enable dma mode so we don't need to do this ourselves for the drivers we're using the Nvidia 45.23 these are highly regarded in the Retro PC Community they have a good balance between performance compatibility and features and for the Sound Blaster live we're loading the OTG to sellers drivers and as always you will find links Down Below in the video description with resources if you want to find those downloads let's run some benchmarks GL quick shows that opengl performance is excellent even at 1600 by 1200 we're getting 86 FPS let's enable some eye candy features 2x AF and 2xaa and we can see at 1280 by 1024 it is still playable with 66 FPS Dragon supports the DirectX 6 API this game is a bit more demanding but even here 1600 by 1200 67 FPS which is beautiful enabling 2x AF and 2x AAA is a little bit of a struggle for Dragon but up to 1024x768 we are still getting 71 FPS and now let's test a few games the first one is tachyon The Fringe from the year 2000 developed by novologic they are well known they did Comanche Maximum Overkill and also the Delta Force Series so this is a good old space shooter right up my alley it supports up to 1024 by 768 which is the resolution I've been using to capture all the footage all the details I maxed them all out and also some audio audio quality settings that's also maxed out and I'm using a joystick the thrustmaster t16000 M there are no drivers needed you just plug it in and Windows 98 installs some USB input drivers there's a control panel where you can check that all the functions work the rudder the throttle and so on and yeah in the game you can map some of the keys around but it wasn't really necessary the throttle and the rudder that worked out of the box I really like this game because it has a nice balance it's quite easy to get into but it has enough complexity to get you going so first you accept some training missions to get used to the controls the weapons and everything and in terms of complexity I fill it somewhere between like Wing command and X-Wing so it's very similar to Wing Commander you have missions where you need to escort ships or take out enemies but it also has things like where you can distribute the energy to your Shields and to the weapons very similar to X-Wing so yeah all in all I played maybe an hour or so and really enjoyed it and going forward what I'm gonna what I'm gonna do is save the save games at the end of doing a video project and then I can continue playing games with the next test machine so you fly missions you get paid you can upgrade web happens and features of your ship and very likely you can buy faster ships as well so yeah really looking forward there is a plot in their story and you can do side quests so really excited this game you can buy it from Gog and you just copy the game folder so you install it under Windows 10 copy the game folder across and it works Straight Out of the Box the next game is Max Payne by remedy entertainment I don't think this needs an introduction but it's really the first time that I'm playing this is out of Finland by members from the demosing group Future Crew they made death rally a game published by apogee and then later the next game was Max Payne in 2001 and some of the assets of that game ended up in 3D Mark 2001 SE which is really interesting this game is quite dark and violent you are starting off as a yeah as a cop and then something happens to your family and you become an undercover DEA agent and there's some meeting in a subway station that goes south and there's this concept of bullet time where you can slow down the speed and you can still aim and shoot I struggled a little bit with the controls maybe my reactions are just not fast enough but it was a little bit clunky and I kept dying so I find even on easy this game seems to be a little bit on the hard side um I couldn't find enough health and and kept dying so maybe I need more practice or if you have any tips to let me know we're running a 1024 by 768 Graphics all the details are maxed out and this is the steam version now you know steam doesn't work under Windows XP under Vista let alone Windows 98 so you have to grab a no CD patch copy it into the folder and then the game runs under Windows 98 without any dramas I'm continuing to play screamer 4x4 I really like this game a four-wheel drive racing simulator it has the opengl API but also supports direct 3D and glide on the GeForce go with opengl it's the fastest option we're running at 1024x768 the game was released in 2001 developed by Channel 42 software developer it's a fun game but what I'm noticing is I'm not making much progress so it's yeah it seems quite hard I haven't been able to unlock anything supposedly you're able to unlock new cars and tires and whatnot but yeah I find the championship really difficult so maybe I need more practice or some sort of a cheat code total Annihilation a really fun RTS game and I've been playing this quite a bit the technical aspects are really impressive so I'm using a 16 by 10 monitor with 1920x1200 pixels the GeForce supports that resolution and so does the game and you get said a really wide image of the game world and I also figured out that you can kill commands which is really interesting so in the beginning when a game is paused you can already cue commands and build some of your infrastructure and then you just unpause the game and off it goes so the technical aspects of this game are impressive it runs silky smooth of course and yeah I want to play more so I'm Gonna Keep Those safe games for future projects so I'm really liking what I'm seeing with the GeForce 4mx under Windows 98 performance is excellent and this is very similar it reminds me of the GeForce FX which back in the day it was a video card that you wanted to avoid very poor DirectX 9 performance but now for Retro Gaming they have become very desirable and these cards yeah it's very similar situation back in the day you wanted to avoid them but now for Windows 98 Retro Gaming these are really really nice opengl performance is excellent and video does opengl really well and DirectX 7 that's all you need under Windows 98 if you want DirectX 8 in my opinion you better off going with Windows XP anyway the specifications of the video cards they matter a lot especially the memory bus avoid 64-bit interfaces apparently they're even cards with SDR memory these are even worse so you want the full 128 bit interface so look for a MX 440 or mx460 a few notes on the driver we're using driver version 45 23 if you have a half decent processor together with this video card you will have a good experience in most games but there are some edge cases where Achievers 2 might be better using a GeForce 2 you can use very old video drivers and there are some games out there that might have compatibility issues with this video new card and this driver version so a GeForce 2 lets you try out more drivers different drivers and also CPU performance the 4523 is a little bit more demanding on the CPU so you want to have a half decent processor if you're using something slow like an entry level Pentium 2 again you might be better off with a GeForce 2 and some older drivers because they are more efficient and also look out for faster options maybe you come across the GeForce 3 or Achievers for TI I like this one this is the GeForce 4ti 4200 they are much faster and they support DirectX 8 so you could use Windows XP or maybe build a dual boot machine with both operating systems so all in all as long as the memory interface has 128 bits the GeForce 4mx gets the thumbs up highly recommended for Windows 98 Retro Gaming you will have a good experience now Below in the comments I would love to hear from you your experience with the GeForce 4 MX were you misled by Nvidia or were you clever enough did you stay up to date with the reviews and you knew exactly what's going on would love to hear from you and also future video suggestions please leave them down below in the comment section I really every comment and always love hearing from you and that's it for this video guys thank you so much for watching I shall see you soon with another one

Channel: PhilsComputerLab

Views: 22,240

Keywords: GeForce4 MX, GeForce 4 MX, Nvidia, MX 440, MX 460, MX 4000, MX 420, MX SE, Windows 98 SE, Retro Gaming, Classic Games, Old Computers

Id: Jbd1wPmx65w

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 14 2023