3. How Fast Do You 4Go?

Going fast in the mobile video product space is the result of a combination of many things. That the GeForce4 Go is using much of the technology derived from it's big brother isn't a real surprise.

The GeForce4 Go features an integrated transform and lighting engine for texture and lighting (T & L) support, using the GeForce4 Go's 256 bit graphics engine with 4 texture-mapped, filtered, and lit textels per clock cycle.

You might have already noticed that we have not mentioned NVIDIA's nfiniteFX technology, which, in NVIDIA branding-speak, means that the card supports vertex shading and offers full DirectX 8.x support. The GeForce4 Go does not include the nfiniteFX-engine, so you therefore don't get the current pinnacle of graphics technology. This is not really as much of an issue as it might appear on the surface, because currently no one has vertex shading and full DirectX 8.x support for a mobile platform (yet). New software that supports vertex shading has been slow to arrive so far, but it is important to note this for your future reference. So, if you are putting off the purchase of a new notebook because you're waiting for full hardware support for vertex shading and DirectX 8.x, it is going to be some time before you see it.

Here is an up-close look at the Dell GeForce4 Go 64 MB DDR modular board will be found in the Dell Latitude C840 and Dell Inspiron 8200.

In the GeForce4 Go, you will find support for 32 bit color with 32 bit Z/ Stencil buffer support. The NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR) is able to pump out up to eleven textures and lighting operations per clock cycle. Single pass multi-texturing and cubic environment mapping are also supported. It is ironic that these features have now become so standard in graphics card technology that we often just quickly gloss them over, because in notebook video technology, this is still a rather new addition.

The GeForce4 Go offers full AccuView Antialiasing that has been specially enhanced for the mobile market. The GeForce4 Go version of AccuView attempts to address these issues by being more focused on visual quality, as it is much more noticeable on the higher resolution LCDs found in today's notebooks. The AccuView Antialiasing technology supports 2X, 4X, Quincunx, and the new 4XS sampling modes. The new 4XS sampling mode is targeted to provide users with visual quality that is more like what you find with desktop PCs. With AccuView turned on you can expect to take a performance hit, though it was not as big as we might have expected. I think previously we questioned the need for more powerful AA technology in notebooks, but, based on the increased need for higher visual quality, it will only be truly useful if we don't experience too much in the way of performance degradation.