The great thing is that I had a MX 460 many years ago that I put into a former friend of mine's computer to upgrade it a bit and make it possible for them to play vidoes on the TV with that RCA video output... he sold the computer with the MX 460 for 20 bucks to get some weed.
Video Cards I gave away for 0 money: Matrox Mystique, Voodoo 1, Vanta 32MB PCI, Kyro 2, GF 3 TI 200, Radeon 9600 Pro, FX 5900 XT, GF 7800 GT, GTX 260. Only main cards. I also had a lot of outdated cards and PCs which I got for 0, rebuild and gave away for 0. And for real, they are all worth 0. Still funny that people pay a ton of money for worthless electronics from the past. ^^ 20 Bugs for a old PC is a good deal. But today everyone seams like to wanna be a rich kid collector. All that electronics are mass produced. Stop that collecting nonesense and use it dammit. ^^
I ended up with the GeForce 3 ti 200, smacked a Zalman passive cooler on it and overclocked it beyond ti 500 speeds. It was a great card back then. I still have it somewhere in my ever growing collection of hardware.
The MX series was definitely seen at the time as a disgrace by NVIDIA for misleading consumers with the GeForce4 name, and probably helped them decide to make the FX series feature-complete all across the line. For us GPU nerds it's a very interesting card, performance is good but then you remember it only has two pipelines! Amazing what newer rendering efficiency can do to an older architecture.
Yup, it wasn't that bad of a card provided you can buy one at a reasonable price. For what it was the card was priced pretty poorly compared to the GF 2MX when those were launched. I snagged a 4MX 440 w/ TV Tuner for a lower end build for my parents PC while I went ahead with a GeForce 4 4200 Ti.
Which is why I was glad I went with the Radeon 9700 Pro after my GeForce 4 Ti4200 as the FX line was loud, hot and didn't offer too much of a performance boost if any over the 9700 Pro. I bought the card partially due to the Doom 3 hype and the test system was using a 9700 Pro but it also showed no performance hit with the graphical goodies turned on (at the time).
The FX line was arguably a bigger debacle than the Geforce "4 mx" BS. Lucky for nVidia, ATI sucked at creating drivers, or nVidia might've been killed during that era for those huge mistakes. Hell, it really only took one big mistake for 3dfx to die, and nVidia got away with TWO of them. Like I said, they got very very lucky, and should thank their lucky stars every night over ATI's relatively poor drivers at the time, which hurt their image and likely caused quite a few potential customers to go with nVidia.
The MX 460 was barely faster than the MX 440 and too expensive for what it was; that's what I remember. The MX 440 also overclocked massively, easily wiping out that difference. It was later replaced with the GF4 Ti4200, which was a very, very good deal. Price drops kept the MX 440 relevant and made it a much better deal than it originally was. The MX 440 became a dirt cheap OEM AGP-slot-filler, with decent performance in the most popular games of the time, which still all had a DX7 path or openGL equivalent. Max Payne, Serious sam FE and SE, Commanche 4, Morrowind, Quake III, Unreal tournament, Half-life mods. Many simply didn't need or care for anything faster or care about shaders until Doom 3/Far cry/half-life 2 because they were too busy playing some of the best multiplayer games ever made, most of which ran easily on a cheap PC or demanded a fast CPU rather than a fast graphics card (UT, Commanche 4, Morrowind). Don't underestimate half-life mods. They were *immensly* popular. Stock HLDM was great fun flying around with the gauss canon, I really liked Counter-strike before the community became too infested with toxic idiots but that game became massive. Day of Defeat was pretty good, huge game. Natural-selection was *amazing* and the third most popular game on steam 2003-ish when it really got going; I played that off and on into the 2010's when server populations finally became too low. Team fortress classic, The specialists, Science and industry, action HL; so many mods.
It's funny, I didn't have a single MX 440, like a proper one. Only cut-down version with slow memory. It seems most cards out and about are not as fast as the reference models.
would be interesting to see a comparison on both to see the difference, I've got a box full of mx440's tried putting some on ebay but no one wanted them!! I run one in a Dell OptiPlex GX150 with a PIII-S 1.4GHz for some retro Windows 98 Gaming and it performs flawlessly (partly due to it being a nice bit newer than the games it plays of course)
I was actually building a PC back then in 2001/2002 - I don't remember exactly, but I believe the GF4 lineup was either just released or at least announced by the time I was picking the parts. I never seriously considered the GF4 MX cards, thinking that "in a year or two, all games will start requiring shader support and that card won't be worth much". In the end, I went with Gainward-branded GF3 card - the original GF3, not Ti200 or Ti500, but factory-overclocked to almost Ti500 level. And it was a great choice indeed, with few upgrades (mostly RAM and HDD) that PC served me and my dad (a more avid gamer than myself) well until around 2008/2009 - by then, the ageing AXP1700+ and GF3 were getting big hiccups with new games, but most of them were actually still playable at the lowest settings, or at least we could try. With a GF4 MX, I wouldn't be able to get anything more than a "DX8 support required" error message in any 2008 game.
That is actually quite impressive for a system of that time to last that long. Graphics card release cycles were around 6 months and processors scaled similar. Unlike to day, where a 5 year old machine is almost as fast as a new one except for the graphics card. Even the C2Q in my other machine from 2009 is still decent today.
huh. i bought a ti4400 and it was outdated the year i bought it because battlefield 2 wouldn't run on dx8 cards, it required at least support for sm1.4 (which the radeon 8500 offered) or sm2( radeon 9500/9700). it was one of the worst cards i've ever bought and certainly the most expensive. i paid what would be 1080ti money for it at the time after correction. it was also unbeliveably slower than the 9500PRO (it's direct competitor) in newer games like doom3 and half life 2. it was a landslide, the radeons were at least twice as fast. man... geforce 4 sucked. the entire lineup.
i of course skipped that entire gen. i had my ti4400, my brother had his 9500pro. his card was miles better, but mine was serviceable until the 6800GS came out. that one, that one was a beast. i unlocked the extra 4 pipelines AND overclocked it. it handily beat a 6800GT by a mile.
I had the MX420 variant and used it up until probably 2009 with Quake 3, CS:Source and Final Fantasy XI mostly. I still have it somewhere in an old PC build.
The MX 440 was the first GFX card that got me into PC gaming back in the day. Affordable price and good performance for a budget build. I was able to play GTA 3,GTA4 and the NFS Underground games on my Monitor or I could just easily hook it up to the TV via the video out feature and play some racing games with my friends in the living room. lol one of the main reasons I enjoyed gaming more on my PC than my PS1/PS2 was that I could play any of my fav MP3's in the background while gaming and turning off the in game tracks.
@@stam1ska And it didn't need to be that way! The PS2 didn't have pixel shaders either, only vertex shaders! And the GeForce 4MX DID have pixel shaders that worked similar to Gamecube's fixed function pixel shades thanks to the NSR (Nvidia Shading Rasterizer). Doom 3 looked as good as it does on DX8 cards, minus the heat haze. It was just EA being EA, doing the bare minimum but not put lots of effort, unlike id software.
From what I'm seeing by the charts, the 8500 LE was the value leader of that era of video cards. The 8500 LE was also a DX 8.1 card, where the Geforce4MX only supported DX 7.
The real question is: how compatible is the 8500 LE or the other Radeon cards? The games tested were all quite big names but there's quite a lot of (slightly older) games that are picky about the 2D support such as Destruction Derby 2. The Radeon cards I had always had difficulty supporting all the games I liked to play. I'd still be interested in getting one for my Pentium III to see how well it performs.
The GeForce actually 4MX supported DX8, but only partially. You see, it inherited the NSR (Nvidia Shading Rasterizer) engine from the GeForce 2, which gave it some pixel shading capability. If you notice the Doom 3 gameplay, you'll see that it looks like Doom 3 with its fancy lighting despite it allegedly being only DX7 compatible and not having shaders. What it DID lack was vertex shaders, so none of the heat haze from the flames.
Max Mustermann Lol except every Medion out there from that era in Germany has a GF4 MX 440 or 460, I've literally had a box full of them that I dumped, and still don't regret getting rid of. Absolutely awful cards.
GeForce 4 MX was a card for cheap OEMs and people that didn't understand that it wasn't a proper GeForce 4, so the top model of this "con" made no sense
I did'nt have any money back then, so I stuck with my Geforce 2 MX400 until I build my next computer. Going from a Duron 700 to an Athlon XP 2500+ @3200+ clocks with a Geforce 5700LE was a mighty big ypgrade in performance. The biggest leap ever for me now that I think of it :)
I put an MX460 in a PC I built for a friend and it died like 2 weeks later. They didn't have any more 460s in stock so we got a 440 and some money back instead.
I had a geforce 4mx 420 (with sdr memory that overclocked very high lucky, big help). It was a nice performance jump coming from a riva tnt 2 m64. When DirectX 8 games became the standard (and the 4mx was nog good anymore) i upgraded to a geforce 4 4200 Ti.
Same. But it was such a piece of junk for GTA San Andreas. 16 bit color is like cancer on that game. At lowest graphical settings, it actually ran okay on the integrated gpu with 32bit color, whatever it was.
I owned the Radeon 8500 was a beast of a card back then most of my friends had the Geforce MX 440, but to be honest I never knew anyone with a 460. Years later I got jealous of the 9700pro my friend had and then spurged on a Geforce 5700 ultra , sure it wasn't as fast as the 9700pro but I loved it.
This brings back memories... My very first hardware buy was an MX 420 (Made by Creative), the only decent gpu that I could buy at the time. Turned out, when I learned to overclock, I had found a perfect starter to work on. After a fan was slammed on the heatsink, it took nearly 100 MHz extra on the core with no questions asked, and ran as an impromptu MX 460 for 4-5 years... it was a bit slower, not having DDR RAM like the 460, though. The MX cards (like the GF2 MX400 and Ultras) could also do "hardware" wallhacking in Half-life engine games when running OpenGL mode with certain nvidia driver versions. This could only be detected by looking directly at the player's screen, as for everyone else, it looked normal...
I had one for 7 years and it went pretty good for me as it had dual VGA output and video capture and it Was very usefull. It even had dual BIOS! No GT 4200 had those features for the same price.
Personally back when all this was happening every mag was telling you ATI was the way to go. So never had any experience with MXs or the FX5 series, because why buy a Trabant when you could go BMW. However for me personally its good to learn about the Ge Force MXs and 5 series as I avoided them (like the plague) and only went ATI. All this changed with DOOM 3. But maybe I am getting ahead of myself,
That's great. I did have a Radeon 9800 back in the day, but mostly I had Nvidia. The Radeon 4850 was also a top card. I'm getting more ATI cards for the future, so watch the space :D
That sounds good. I need to change what I said about the FX5 series. The 5700 was an excellent card, and if you could afford a good gaming laptop was the only Nvidia mobile card that could compete with ATI 9700. I think I had a 2nd hand Acer with it in and it rocked. For the next few years I went Nvidia 6800, but the best of that era were the ATI 850 XTX's They cost £450 ! Each. Ouch. But they were as fast as the Geforce 7900 of the FOLLOWING generation. which is pretty impressive all things considering. They were the very first Crossfire set up, which you got in a big box costing £1000. Two 850's, all the cables and 5 games. Santa Claus didn't hear my prayers that year, nor did my boss.The next generation is gonna show up who are the fanboys of either side. Cant wait!
Well I should have a 850 XT PE very soon :) I'm going with PCIe, much cheaper and easier to find parts. They can be had for a good price from eBay US at the moment.
It has to be PCIe for crossfire but yes the AGP card was what everyone wanted coz most people still had AGP and were pissed off with all the PCIe BS. AGP bandwith was huge and had a lot of legs left in it. But shared cheap hyper memory was what the cheapskate industry moguls wanted to rip us off with. But the concept of PCIe is sound, its just they chopped everybody off at the legs by introducing it so ruthlessly.
The Geforce 4 MX440 was a beastly card when it released. That card was my first real foray into DX cards and the start of my obsession with serious PC gaming. Before I used the MX440 I had been using the same Pentium MMX PC I built in high school. By the time 2002 rolled around I knew it was time to upgrade that 4 year old antique. The MX440 was one of the best price/performance cards out there. Max Payne ran very well on my Pentium 3 866Mhz and Return of Castle Wolfenstein was playable at some good details. I still game on those upper-low end cards today. Of course I didn't use that MX440 very long. Once the Radeon 9xxx series launched the 9550 was such a sweet card for it's price. Vanilla WoW on a Celeron D and 9550. Man I miss 2005
I remember reading about the Geforce 4 line-up in the February of 2002 issue of PC Magazine (Greek Edition). The article's writer was clear that the MX cards lacked Direct3D 8 support. So, it was obvious to me that a gamer should go for either an MX440 (which was cheap) or a Ti 4200 (not so expensive as other Ti's, had support for pixel and vertex shaders). Unfortunately, my go to sources presented ATI cards less frequently, up until 9700 and 9500 were introduced.
The Ti4200 wasn't out at first; it was released a couple of months after the Ti4400 and Ti4600 when nVidia realized their mistake with the MX460. For the recommended price of the MX460 you could get a geforce 3 ti 200 quite easily. The Ti4200 was almost a mistake on the opposite end by nVidia; pretty close to ti4600 performance at half the price.
I had a ti 4200 overclocked to clock speeds between ti4400 and ti4600 cards To wait for the ti 4200 I continued using a Geforce 2 MX 400 overclocked until the ti4200 was available in Australia.
My Dell from 2001 had this video card I was so glad I was able to play more games on PC since my last PC from 1998 was a Compaq Presario with an ATI Rage Pro which only gave me software render graphics and I remember playing GTA3 with no problems with this card it was amazing but then I had to upgrade to a Geforce FX 5500 for one game in 2003 that was Legacy of Kain Defiance because of features in Direct 3D that had T and L shading. After that I just kept gaming on PS2 which back in 2004 and 2005 blew my mind how they push that console.
I remember getting my first computer. It came equipped with an ABIT motherboard for Athlon XP processors, featuring an nForce Ultra 400 chip and an integrated MX440. Extremely good value at the time. Had to buy a better graphics card 2 or 3 years later when DirectX 8 & 9 were more massively used
huh, that 8500 was a freaking best. it was the best card of its generation (which is the geforce 3 gen), but it wasnt THIS good back then. holy shit it improved a generation's worth of performance, even a couple in some games.
Yeah, I still have the LE version and a Ti 200 too. I never compared them myself and thought they might be about the same. It surprised me that it more often than not beats the Ti 500.
Back then I had an MX-440 paired with an Athlon 2600+. At first I was pleased to know that I have a GeForce 4, since some high-school colleagues still had a GF2 or even TNT-Riva. I played Return to the Castle Wolfenstein, NFS Underground 1&2, GTA Vice-City, Painkiller, Alien vs. Predator. It was a pretty good card. Later on, I upgraded to Radeon x550, which was better, but I wen to University, and I didn't have that much time for gaming, since the computer remained at my parrent's home. But I re-constructed that PC recently, with Windows XP, Athlon 2500+, FX-5500 and I started an older game, HL Blue Shift, which seems pretty interesting to play.
Ha i just did buy a beautfiul looking Packard Bell Machine (in Germany) with a Athlon XP2600+ (Barton Core), XP License, DVD Drive, Floppy Drive, 1GB DDR (2x512) PC2100/266 Ram, 120GB 7200rpm HD, and a Geforce 4 MX 460 64MB Dual VGA, S-Video In, Composite In for 31€ include Shipping :D Just the Card alone cost between 13 and 20€ and is only 3 times listed on germany ebay.
I had to do a double-take. I didn't think a game as new as Tomb Raider Anniversary would be able to play on a GF4 so I was about ready to comment about this, but it seems that the game does indeed run on those GPUs. And well, apparently! I miss these TR "Reboots" because they're far, far more fun than the nu-TR games which have turned Lara into a completely unlikeable killing machine going through ham-fisted emotional development and gameplay ripped from Uncharted. *Shakes fists at Square Enix* Oh, sorry. Another nice video Phil, great job!
OMG ive looked every where for the prices of the g4 mx cards and you have a promo pic. Now I finally know what the first graphics card i ever bought was. I knew I only spent a $100 in early 2000s. Doing some investigating and searching, NOW i remember. It was a PNY verto g4 mx 420. Geez finally.
I'd read all the reviews so knew the MX was a con. waited the extra time for the Ti4200 and was really pleased I did, was a huge upgrade for me. I think it clocked to nearly 4600 speeds too! It was however really noisy with the tiny high pitch fan so I ended up putting a big Zalman double sided passive cooler on it for silence :)
Yeah.. but the problem is that those cards were still too slow for dx8's shaders so at the end of the day you didnt get any better performance or image quality and you paid way more. Some of the later cards were much slower in dx7 than the mxs too which was a problem. You could choose 30 fps with dx8 or 45 with dx7, meanwhile you would get 50-60 with a mx....Same that happened later with the 9800 from ati, it was a pretty cool dx9 card but at the end of the day you wanted to switch back to dx8 if you wanted really decent performance...Same that happens nowadays with the first rtx cards... nice feature set with underperforming hardware to make any real use of it...
Nice Beetle! 9:03 I have a Geforce 3 ti 200 but I had to re-cap it. (it works again, but s.t. I rather put the voodoo3 in) But my MX460 keeps crashing in windows (DOS works, though). Love the review! Update: You should revisit the Retro market for cheap Win98 3d cards again! For less than 20 Euro: GF3 ti200, GF4 MX440/460, GF4 TI4200, Radeon 9100
The MX440 was my first dedicated GPU, used to play a lot of CS, before that I suffered with an onboard Sis-530 8mb when playing CS and Quake 2. I remember running the leaked Doom 3 alpha with my MX440 all the way back in early 2003 and getting shocked of how revolutionary it looked with real projected shadows compared to anything that came before it, even at 640x480 and sub-30 fps it was amazing.
I just picked up one of these for 18 euro plus shipping from Germany for my Shuttle XPC Windows 98 build. I'm currently using an FX5600 which is also really good but thanks to the manual texel alignment feature on this card I can play X-wing alliance without those ugly replacement fonts!
The MX 4xx video card line flooded the Brazilian market and sold a lot. Every cheap gamer PC came with this line. Titanium models were rare and extremely expensive plus astronomical taxes.
If you wanted to play Doom 3 or Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and bought this thinking it was a cheaper Ti, you were pretty much screwed. I remember that Neverwinter Nights also gave the 4 MX series cards a workout.
I did buy a Geforce 4 MX440 with 64MB from MSI, and I had it for a while. It was good performer for the money, and it was very easily overclockable, but I ended up selling it and getting a proper Geforce 4 Ti4200 128MB.
I remember skipping GeForce 4 because I had purchased at a bargain price a GeForce 3 - 500 with 64mb that was performing close to GeForce 4200 but GeForce 4 MX was selling like hotcakes because of the price and because many people didn't know the difference and believed the MX to be the real GeForce 4! Thank you for testing at 1280*1024 resolution! Love your videos man! hope you progress through the years and reach the GeForce 5/ Radeon 9 series :) !
Had a Mx440 on my sister's PC, she bought it in a rush and the only available models were MX440 and 7500LE ... I still cry at night about poor GPU choices made because of money and necessity to have something running (I also had a 9600SE and a 5700LE, then I said never again...)
One thing to mention is that this card also represents the last of the MX GPU's. After this, nVidia stopped using the name MX. Now days, cards like this make for interesting builds. I've noticed the 8500 cards are somewhat scarce now days as well. Probably the best thing that ever happened to ATI was AMD because of drivers. ATI had great hardware engineers, but their software team just had a hell of a time with drivers. ATI was good for drivers in the 98 and earlier days, but when 2000 hit, and NT became more mainstream, they, and a lot of other companies, Creative uh hem... SB LIVE... uh hem... ya..., had a very hard time wrapping their brains around how to get hardware working under NT. ATI could have been the dominant GPU if it hadn't been for the damn drivers frankly. Now days, ya drivers really aren't an issue with these older cards which is really nice. Being I was die hard NVIDIA back during this time period, I am more about ATI now days as my go to GPU for this era of hardware. Speaking of nvidia, as you mentioned, the price of the GF4 Ti cards was quite expensive. This was about the time nVidia thought they could start really gouging for their GPU's. When I bought my Viper V770 Ultra, it was new, retail and cost $249 in the store. At that time, TNT2 Ultra was nvidia's top of the line GPU. Look at how nVidia crept their prices up over the years there for their top end gpu's, not counting Quadro of course, just mainstream gaming gpu's. I always thought nVidia was asking too much for their GPU's around this time, and still do frankly. Of course they are even MORE now days for the top end gpu. So many GF4 ti's have died over the years because of bad BGA's, in fact, that is where baking video cards started :)
I'm really eager to check out the 8500 in more detail, it seems to have aged well. When I was looking for one last year, I ended up with the AIW version, it seems to be overlooked.
AIW is all I ever see for sale. I haven't purchased one though because all of them I see for sale are the AIW 8500DV which is basically just an 8500LE and supposedly are underclocked due to the firewire port so I don't think they would overclock very well. I don't know why a true 8500 is rare, maybe they were not very popular. I see LE's for sale often though.
WaybackTECH Same. I got the FireGL version, but drivers are not great. NV does it better with Quadros to be honest, you can just use all the standard drivers. With the FireGL you can't.
I bought a GF4 MX 440 but it had some problems. The graphics looked raw and no DX8 support. So I went back to the store and changed it for a GF3 Ti200 and that was a good decision.
I got an ASUS GeForce 4 Ti4800 for 30 €... Would have been a lot less cheap back in the day. And it was an upgrade from a (very noisy) GeForce 4 Ti 4600. :) I love this card, it just works with DOS, 98, and XP and all the games I throw at it. It's also quiet (although the PC case I got helps a lot). The universal AGP connector means I can put it everywhere, and the performance with the most demanding DirectX 8.1 games is very good. :) I also have a very good ATI Radeon 8500LE, but some games don't like ATI cards. :(
It's basically just a GF2 MX just on steroids. I had a GF2 MX back in the day, I got a free GF4 MX440-8X for an upgrade, but after I got a GF4 Ti4200 that was something I could call an upgrade. Upgraded also that later to Radeon 9700 Pro and damn that was fast.
I actually had the MX460 myself back in the day. I worked in the trade and got one at serious markdown. Never gave me any real trouble, but the most I taxed it with was GTA Vice City.
In my country in eastern Europe both the mx440 and the mx460 were very popular(probably not right at launch time,but a later when they got cheaper),i remember a lot of ppl were having them in their systems back then.They were even sold and ppl bought them as late as 2004.They had adequate performance and they were cheap,which was important in a country with low income.As a student back then it was a great difference between, what u wanted to buy and what u could afford.
Me personaly never owned a geforce 4 mx,i had to squeeze everything i could out of my geforce 2 mx 400-64mb until late 2003,when i bought a fx 5200-128mb but with 64 bit bus,i was very proud that in need for speed underground my fx could render the people at the start of the race,while the geforce 4 mx couldn't :P
I never knew someone with GF4 Mx, at least in Eastern Europe people either bought GF2 MX if you were budget oriented or waiting and waiting and as for me I bought GF 5200 which was a really nice jump from GF2MX that most colleague had but many more supported features.
One other thing is nVidia released the same year NV18 GeForce4 MX440-8X with AGP8x with 275MHz GPU clock and most vendors produced it with 128MB 515MHz ram(Gainward had an 600MHz ram version GeForce4 PowerPack! Pro/600-8X XP 128MB Golden Sample) which technically made it almost as fast as the MX460 if not faster. Other important thing about the NV18 - MX440-8X was that it supported AGP Sideband across variaety of Chipsests while NV17 (MX420,MX440,MX460) still had issues using AGP sideband on some VIA chipsets (like KT133A) which is not a feature just to pass by. So if you look for the fastest Celsius architecture GPU (GeForce 256 > GeForce 2 > GeForce 4 MX) look no further than MX440-8X it runs on AGP4x boards for sure and it is fully refined and free of problems (like the AGP Sideband functionallity) but be carefull there are alot of RAM variations from shity 162MHz (DDR332MHz) to lightning fast 300MHz (DDR600MHz) as the 256MHz (DDR513MHz) being the most common ones.
Because most techs/geeks knew it was going to be a slower version. Yes, it was basically the Celeron of graphics cards, compared to the regular GF4 versions. Practically all the MX versions really. That is what I sort of remember reading about. And that was 2 decades ago. Times flies.
I remember buying my first card in 2003, it was a G4 MX 4000, I didnt know it was a rebadged Geforce 2 and later learned that was a scam, then I get a 6200 GT. lol
Just too big of an audience of MX440's to ignore, so they found a way to get it running. I distinctly remember running Doom3 on my MX440 and being blown away by the graphics, at a wonderful 5-10fps. I swear I heard that in order to get it to work, it was actually one of the very few games that used the Nvidia Shading Rasterizer, but I can't find any proof of this.
You can check out neo/renderer/draw_nv10.cpp in the source code to see how it works. It uses the fixed-function nVidia combiners via their OpenGL extension. I'm not sure about NSR, I haven't found any info on it beyond the press-release.
Actually everyone was wrong. Geforce 4 MX had great support and from today's perspective it was a great card. Geforce 3 or 4 Ti offered very little for the increased cost. Thanks to the Geforce 4 MX, earlier GF 2 GTS, Pro and Ultra had prolonged life. Game developers had to support fixed-pipeline for a few years longer, actually allowing owners of the Original Geforce to use it until X360 was on the market. Geforce 3 and 4 Ti faded away in the same time as Geforce 4 MX. There was very short period of games that required shader model 1.3. Game designers jumped very quickly to shader model 2 (DX 9b) requirement. Oblivion was one of the first games to have shader 2.0 requirements and the year later Bioshock was out that required 3.0 shaders. Geforce 3, 4 Ti and even 5 FX even though they had good shader support for their time were obsolete very quickly. Radeons were even worse. Gamers with high-end X700 and X800 cards were furious since they only supported shader model 2.0 and Bioshock won't even run on them, like many others games that followed. Owners of GF 6600 or even 6200 128-bit could easily play those games on medium-low detail, while X700 and X800 cards were useless. Nvidia was actually very clever with restricting shaders to high-end cards. That move allowed to sell cheap, but powerful cards that were hardware limited on advanced effects but in the same time they could push 60 fps in quite high resolution with good textures and complex geometry. They made low-cost cards good for gaming and in the same time they had desirable cards in the high-end market.
Oh the shaders on early DX 9 cards were a mess. Radeon 9000 series supported DX 9.0 Geforce FX supported DX 9.0a (but not 9.0b) Radeon R400 chips supported DX 9.0b (but not 9.0a) Later Geforce and Radeon X100 supported DX 9.0c Result was the usual fallback to plain 9.0 until 9.0c came along.. Some developers actually worked out render paths for all of it, but that was quiter rare.
Leeki85 hmm having owner a 4400ti, this card was much better than the fx5### series which were both hot and had very bad AA and performance was quite bad. I went onto a x800 after and that was decent :)
You should add that both PoP: Warrior Within and Two Thrones had lower requirements and worked fine not only on Geforce 4 MX but also on Geforce 2. This is what I was talking about. Geforce 4 MX sold so well that game developers had to support it. Requiring shaders in Sands of Time was actually a stupid decision since when you used a software that bypassed shaders game worked normally, the only difference was missing bloom and no water reflections. Very minor things in the game. The one of the first truly shader based game was Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It used shaders to much greater extend. Prior games relied on fixed-pipeline functions to draw geometry and they used shaders for simple post-process effects. Chaos Theory introduced shader based materials. If you used that software that bypassed shaders for GF 4 MX you would get a blank screen in Chaos Theory. At that time games started to use shader model 2 anyway and support for Geforce 3 and 4 Ti was very rough. As I said those cards had no opportunity to shine. The only reason why early shaders were used in the first place was first Xbox that had Geforce 3 hardware. When Geforce 4 MX was abandoned many gamers bought very popular Radeon 9600 or a cheaper 9550 one. Those cards along Radeon 9700 were the best Radeons ever made.
The FX5xxx series, with the exception of the leaf-blower FX5800 ultra which people still makes jokes about, was in retrospect not that bad, with very good performance in old-ish games and few games requiring SM2.0 until it was obsolete. In a win98 retromachine I'd pick a FX5700 or FX5900 any day over a 4x00ti card. The performance difference is quite small, until you turn on AA and AF, then the FX is miles ahead. Compatibility wise it doesn't make much difference. If there's one think I can no longer stand it's a lack of AF. I can stand nearest neigbour filtering, noise and all, but I can no longer stand the blurry mess that is straight up bilinear filtering. The original voodoo 1 didn't even look like much of an upgrade to me; framerate is higher, resolution is higher, but the trade off was a blurry soup. In retrospect, you didn't have to use bilinear and could make quake or whatever look as good as in software mode, but I didn't know that. When I got my first graphics card, a cheap ass TNT2 M64, I just accepted that the bluryness was a sad fact of 3D graphics acceleration and acceleration was a must to make Half-life etc. run smooth. Ever since I got my radeon 9800 I just turned AF to forced 16 X and I've not once in almost a decade and a half been tempted to turn off AF in any game.
I'm using an MX 440 AGP 8x card with my Celeron 400A 440BX 98se/2k build. Good general DOS compatibility, decent display quality on VGA, runs PII level DirectX/OpenGL games well in 32-bit colour, plays DVDs smoothly with PowerDVD 5, and is a version that comes with S-Video & DVI-I outputs for further compatibility with a wide range of displays. Currently using driver versions 56.64 for 98se & 81.98 for 2k as they work best without issues for my build, while also supporting widescreen as well at 1280×720 @ 60Hz for my widescreen display.
An interesting card to review would be the Radeon 9000 and the 9000 Pro, the Geforce 4 MX competition, they were cut down versions of the Radeon 8500 core, but still retained the DX8 features and got lower prices
I remember this period well. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago! O_O I remember that the Geforce MX series was really popular, and I encountered multiple people who thought that because they had a "Geforce 4" that they had an "awesome" video card, and I didn't have the heart to tell them that their card kinda sucked, wasn't a good value, and was actually worse than a Geforce 3 ti 200
You described a choice I had to make when I built my computer in summer 2002. I went with a 8500LE - 128mb (Which I remember having the same clocks as the non LEs unlike the 64MB version.) It worked great and I wish I still had the bench marks I had taken when I bought it. Because it was the first piece of a complete new PC I was building that summer it spent about a month (while other parts were on order) in a AMD K6-2+ 500mhz computer. Talk about overkill but it soon went into a XP 2000+. Overall I had no clue what I was doing when I bought that PC but it was a good gaming PC for a kid still in high school. If I understood computer forums better back then I'd likely have gone used from someone who always had to have the best.
I'm actually quite impressed by the Radeon 8500 and 8500 LE performance once you use them with proper drivers. I bought a Radeon 8500 LE when it came out and it was kind of in between the Geforce 3 Ti 200 and 500 in terms of performance. When I see your results with more modern drivers I can clearly see that the old ones were holding back that GPU a lot! It was quite a monster when you realize that the Geforce 4 Ti 4200 is one gen younger and really struggles to get ahead the 8500, even the LE gives it a rough competition in some games.
Yes it's a unique card. One day I'd love to check out different drivers to see the progress, but such a project take a ton of time and in the end is a single slide...
In 2005 I got one from a friend, blown capacitors... I changed them and used for 3-4 months... then I got a FX5200 because not even GTASA run good on that MX...
My understanding was always that the price of the AGP version was too close in price to the Geforce4 Ti 4200, so it wasn't a good value. It got squeezed out by the MX440 below and the Ti 4200 above. The Geforce 3 Ti 500 was also becoming available on the used market, and it was also faster than the Geforce4 MX.
Got myself a dirt cheap gainward gf3 ti200 at that time (~may 2002). Overclocked it to 220/460, which most ti200 could easily achive, and used it until I bought a 9500pro in july 2003. Best bargain ever imo.
That was a good move IMO. You got DX8 compatibility and great performance. Amazing you remember the clock speeds, that would have put your card just ahead of the original GF3.
That card was worth every penny. It survived several socket A boards and was my backup card after the death of my 9500 pro. I even played doom 3 on it in 800x600@low (+ shadows, bump & specular maps) on a Tbred 2000+@2600+. Remember it running around 30ish fps. I'm pretty forgetful though except it's related to work or pc hardware. :>
The MX 460 was positioned too close to the Ti 4200, and it got dropped from the lineup at the release of their AGP 8X refresh. The 8X version of MX 440 had higher clocks that nearly matched the MX 460. The 460 and 128-bit 440-8X (and their Quadro equivalents) are the ultimate D3D 3-7 cards to me.
Back in the day the MX440 was a great seller and people used it for CS and BF1942. Compelling and cheap. But after seeing your benchmarks, it shocked me, the Radeons were powerful back then. But the first one I touched for ATI was the 9500 and 9600 Pro in mates machines. One boarder eventually made a machine of a Prescot and a FX5900. Ran HL2 and Doom 3 rather well. I had a MX440 from a used rig and slapped in a ELSA 6600GT. Wasn't the best build quality I'd say and fully saturated the 350W generic PSU. We were young back then, $300 was as much as we can put out for a card. Wheres a family went back to China to pick one up. Maybe my era's are mixed up, will have to look into hardware timelines.
Back in these days I had a Radeon 7500 and went straight to the TI4200. The MX Line had no goot reputation. Only DirectX7 for a new card. Simply it was a very fast Geforce2.
If I remember correctly, most of the GF3 Ti200 cards could be easily overclocked to GF3 Ti500 performance levels. That should have made that card a much better value than the GF4 MX series of cards, especially that 460. Unless you wanted to spend more (and get more performance) with the GF4 Ti200. I remember kicking myself after I bought a GF3 Ti500 when I saw that the GF3 Ti200 could do that. I should have gotten that instead. Still was a good card and I didn't upgrade from it until my Radeon 9800 PRO AIW card.
The GeForce 4 MX is a GeForce 4 in name only; it's a GeForce 2 MX with some of the GeForce 4 Ti's features, namely dual-monitor support and a 128-bit memory controller. It doesn't have support for programmable shaders.
I had MX 440 too, in one of my first PCs. It was literally everywhere,default option for all OEM PCs - cheap and mostly fine as start. Bad thing is that game developers wasnt that happy. A lot fo games was specially marked "not compatible with MX 4X0". In the end its deprecated very quickly. Strangest thing is that peoples still purchase them on aftermarket. I know that a lot people just trowed these card in trashbin during upgrade.
If games didn't run on the MX, yea that would have been quite negative. I think for a while games supported several cards. In a future video I show this using Half-Life 2, you can run it in DX7 and DX8 mode.
CS/Q3 was THE thing then. And mx440 was the perfect card for these. Dirt cheap with 100fps for CS and 125fps for q3 with high picmic for 100hz monitor.
@@iclicklike3397 For that it was fine, yes. But just a little time later new generation of games was releasing and most of them barely worked on MX440. Crawled like snail in best case. I believe its not reasonable to spend top price for top cards, they all de-valuate quickly but MX series little too cheap.
Nice video as always "thumbs up" what game is that showing up at minute eight??? I bought myself my first computer back then and it had the MSI GeForce4 TI 4200. I was very happy with it and it was used a long time. About three years I got a used Medion PC for cheap with that MX 460 and I was surpriced what I could do out of the box, but a few weeks later it got replaced by an Radeon 9800 Pro, also a great card, since that I prefer ATI/AMD GPU for main use.
I got a Leadtek Winfast GF4 MX440 as a warranty replacement for a faulty Creative GF2 MX DDR. It was a wonderful performer in terms of overclocking, I've managed to push 380 MHz on GPU with stock cooling and, IIRC, 550 MHz on MEM. Unfortunately overclocking was pretty much the only area it performed well, the overall performance was not as entertaining. I sold it, bought a Hercules 8500 128 MB... and I sticked with ATI/AMD ever since.
Notice how Doom 3 still has its fancy lighting on the MX 460 despite it being a DX7 card. The truth is, it's actually partially DX8 compatible, as it DOES have pixel shaders, albeit quite primitive ones. They are there because of the NSR (Nvidia Shading Rasterizer) but most devs were troglodytes and didn't take advantage of it. John Carmack was not one of them, though. And he made a specific render path for the GeForce 2 series that takes advantage of it.
This is around the era when I landed my GeForce 4... I got a test run on an ABIT MX 440, however, I ended ponying up more funds and invested in the big brother, the Ti 4600. A graphics card that stayed with me through to the end of the Socket A era. When people were on Athlon 64's and doing the swap to PCI-E, that was when I made my final AGP purchase, a Nvidia GeForce 7800GS, that one served my Athlon XP rig until its caps blew and I decided to go shopping, and landed on a Core 2 system. Still if I had a much easier time getting the cards back then, I would have picked the ATi Radeon 8500, those benchmarks were just too good. But knowing what I know today, sitting on the fence and waiting for the 9700 would have been more prudent.
I had mx440 and that was one of the worst card i ever had. Lack of dx8 support killed that card very fast. I end up upgrading to GeForce4 TI 4200 AGP 8x 128mb. But back then i didnt have money for new GeForce4 TI or GeForce3 TI so only other choice was GeForce2 TI for similar money as MX440 so i choose MX440.
my first card was a radeon hd 7000. It was so slow, i could never really run any games. It was always choppy. Then i bought an mx440 from my friend at school for 40 dollars ( i sold my 7000 for 20) I just remember the upgrade was huge. I could finally run bf 1942, team fortress, and half life. And it would overclock so good ( added like 10 frames+) that i could play game on higher settings smoothly. Now i got a gtx 1080 ti lol. oh the nostalgia!
I can't get enough of content like this
I'm a proud owner of one. I worked a month to buy it, and I still have it in my Win98 retro PC.
The great thing is that I had a MX 460 many years ago that I put into a former friend of mine's computer to upgrade it a bit and make it possible for them to play vidoes on the TV with that RCA video output... he sold the computer with the MX 460 for 20 bucks to get some weed.
Such a waste
Lord of the Weed^^
I would get it if it was the Gefroce MX420... ;)
Video Cards I gave away for 0 money: Matrox Mystique, Voodoo 1, Vanta 32MB PCI, Kyro 2, GF 3 TI 200, Radeon 9600 Pro, FX 5900 XT, GF 7800 GT, GTX 260. Only main cards. I also had a lot of outdated cards and PCs which I got for 0, rebuild and gave away for 0. And for real, they are all worth 0. Still funny that people pay a ton of money for worthless electronics from the past. ^^ 20 Bugs for a old PC is a good deal. But today everyone seams like to wanna be a rich kid collector. All that electronics are mass produced. Stop that collecting nonesense and use it dammit. ^^
@@nooboardits to pay for divorce lawyers😂
I ended up with the GeForce 3 ti 200, smacked a Zalman passive cooler on it and overclocked it beyond ti 500 speeds.
It was a great card back then. I still have it somewhere in my ever growing collection of hardware.
I was duped into assuming the GeForce 4s would be better than the 3 series.. silly me!!
That’s a cool retro piece of hardware to still have. I always had to sell mine to part fund the next upgrade :(
The MX series was definitely seen at the time as a disgrace by NVIDIA for misleading consumers with the GeForce4 name, and probably helped them decide to make the FX series feature-complete all across the line. For us GPU nerds it's a very interesting card, performance is good but then you remember it only has two pipelines! Amazing what newer rendering efficiency can do to an older architecture.
PixelPipes I almost get the impression people didn't get the concept of a budget card back then, or at least didn't do their research.
Yup, it wasn't that bad of a card provided you can buy one at a reasonable price. For what it was the card was priced pretty poorly compared to the GF 2MX when those were launched. I snagged a 4MX 440 w/ TV Tuner for a lower end build for my parents PC while I went ahead with a GeForce 4 4200 Ti.
enigma776 Nvidia certainly dropped the ball with the FX line, that's for sure.
Which is why I was glad I went with the Radeon 9700 Pro after my GeForce 4 Ti4200 as the FX line was loud, hot and didn't offer too much of a performance boost if any over the 9700 Pro. I bought the card partially due to the Doom 3 hype and the test system was using a 9700 Pro but it also showed no performance hit with the graphical goodies turned on (at the time).
The FX line was arguably a bigger debacle than the Geforce "4 mx" BS. Lucky for nVidia, ATI sucked at creating drivers, or nVidia might've been killed during that era for those huge mistakes. Hell, it really only took one big mistake for 3dfx to die, and nVidia got away with TWO of them. Like I said, they got very very lucky, and should thank their lucky stars every night over ATI's relatively poor drivers at the time, which hurt their image and likely caused quite a few potential customers to go with nVidia.
The MX 460 was barely faster than the MX 440 and too expensive for what it was; that's what I remember. The MX 440 also overclocked massively, easily wiping out that difference. It was later replaced with the GF4 Ti4200, which was a very, very good deal. Price drops kept the MX 440 relevant and made it a much better deal than it originally was. The MX 440 became a dirt cheap OEM AGP-slot-filler, with decent performance in the most popular games of the time, which still all had a DX7 path or openGL equivalent. Max Payne, Serious sam FE and SE, Commanche 4, Morrowind, Quake III, Unreal tournament, Half-life mods. Many simply didn't need or care for anything faster or care about shaders until Doom 3/Far cry/half-life 2 because they were too busy playing some of the best multiplayer games ever made, most of which ran easily on a cheap PC or demanded a fast CPU rather than a fast graphics card (UT, Commanche 4, Morrowind).
Don't underestimate half-life mods. They were *immensly* popular. Stock HLDM was great fun flying around with the gauss canon, I really liked Counter-strike before the community became too infested with toxic idiots but that game became massive. Day of Defeat was pretty good, huge game. Natural-selection was *amazing* and the third most popular game on steam 2003-ish when it really got going; I played that off and on into the 2010's when server populations finally became too low. Team fortress classic, The specialists, Science and industry, action HL; so many mods.
It's funny, I didn't have a single MX 440, like a proper one. Only cut-down version with slow memory. It seems most cards out and about are not as fast as the reference models.
would be interesting to see a comparison on both to see the difference, I've got a box full of mx440's tried putting some on ebay but no one wanted them!! I run one in a Dell OptiPlex GX150 with a PIII-S 1.4GHz for some retro Windows 98 Gaming and it performs flawlessly (partly due to it being a nice bit newer than the games it plays of course)
Yea these MX cards aren't really sought after I'm afraid.
I will try to get a proper MX 440. Worst case I will down-clock the 460.
I actually went with a GF 3 Ti 200 for my retro build in the end.
If you want a MX 440 with faster memory you need to get one with the NV18 chip.
I had a Gainward GF4 MX 440 "GOLDEN SAMPLE".
I still laugh at the name, but it overclocked extremely well and was plenty fast enough for DX7.
I still own two of them, one is AGP, and the other PCI (not express) , but I don't have any motherboard left to use them
The Golden Sample name was reserved for chips that would run faster than the factory clocks. That's why it would overclock.
The Geforce 4 MX 460 - the ultimate Geforce 2 card!
Yea that's how I see it also!
I was actually building a PC back then in 2001/2002 - I don't remember exactly, but I believe the GF4 lineup was either just released or at least announced by the time I was picking the parts. I never seriously considered the GF4 MX cards, thinking that "in a year or two, all games will start requiring shader support and that card won't be worth much". In the end, I went with Gainward-branded GF3 card - the original GF3, not Ti200 or Ti500, but factory-overclocked to almost Ti500 level. And it was a great choice indeed, with few upgrades (mostly RAM and HDD) that PC served me and my dad (a more avid gamer than myself) well until around 2008/2009 - by then, the ageing AXP1700+ and GF3 were getting big hiccups with new games, but most of them were actually still playable at the lowest settings, or at least we could try. With a GF4 MX, I wouldn't be able to get anything more than a "DX8 support required" error message in any 2008 game.
Yea I think having DX8 support was key. Even Far Cry supported it still for example.
That is actually quite impressive for a system of that time to last that long. Graphics card release cycles were around 6 months and processors scaled similar.
Unlike to day, where a 5 year old machine is almost as fast as a new one except for the graphics card. Even the C2Q in my other machine from 2009 is still decent today.
huh. i bought a ti4400 and it was outdated the year i bought it because battlefield 2 wouldn't run on dx8 cards, it required at least support for sm1.4 (which the radeon 8500 offered) or sm2( radeon 9500/9700). it was one of the worst cards i've ever bought and certainly the most expensive. i paid what would be 1080ti money for it at the time after correction.
it was also unbeliveably slower than the 9500PRO (it's direct competitor) in newer games like doom3 and half life 2. it was a landslide, the radeons were at least twice as fast.
man... geforce 4 sucked. the entire lineup.
i of course skipped that entire gen. i had my ti4400, my brother had his 9500pro. his card was miles better, but mine was serviceable until the 6800GS came out.
that one, that one was a beast. i unlocked the extra 4 pipelines AND overclocked it. it handily beat a 6800GT by a mile.
I still have the Geforce 3 ti 200 and sadly it didn't have the HP to push most games. The games looked good but got crappy fps.
I had the MX420 variant and used it up until probably 2009 with Quake 3, CS:Source and Final Fantasy XI mostly. I still have it somewhere in an old PC build.
The Geforce 4 Ti 4200 was my video card for YEARS beyond it's lifetime. I recall playing early builds of HL2 on it.
The MX 440 was the first GFX card that got me into PC gaming back in the day. Affordable price and good performance for a budget build. I was able to play GTA 3,GTA4 and the NFS Underground games on my Monitor or I could just easily hook it up to the TV via the video out feature and play some racing games with my friends in the living room.
lol one of the main reasons I enjoyed gaming more on my PC than my PS1/PS2 was that I could play any of my fav MP3's in the background while gaming and turning off the in game tracks.
Underground - no people at the starting line, no light trails, no motion blur, etc. This game was sad without shaders.
@@stam1ska And it didn't need to be that way! The PS2 didn't have pixel shaders either, only vertex shaders!
And the GeForce 4MX DID have pixel shaders that worked similar to Gamecube's fixed function pixel shades thanks to the NSR (Nvidia Shading Rasterizer). Doom 3 looked as good as it does on DX8 cards, minus the heat haze.
It was just EA being EA, doing the bare minimum but not put lots of effort, unlike id software.
From what I'm seeing by the charts, the 8500 LE was the value leader of that era of video cards. The 8500 LE was also a DX 8.1 card, where the Geforce4MX only supported DX 7.
The real question is: how compatible is the 8500 LE or the other Radeon cards? The games tested were all quite big names but there's quite a lot of (slightly older) games that are picky about the 2D support such as Destruction Derby 2. The Radeon cards I had always had difficulty supporting all the games I liked to play.
I'd still be interested in getting one for my Pentium III to see how well it performs.
MX series supported DX7 _partially_ . It couldn't even run the complete set of benchmarks in 3dmark2000.
The GeForce actually 4MX supported DX8, but only partially. You see, it inherited the NSR (Nvidia Shading Rasterizer) engine from the GeForce 2, which gave it some pixel shading capability.
If you notice the Doom 3 gameplay, you'll see that it looks like Doom 3 with its fancy lighting despite it allegedly being only DX7 compatible and not having shaders.
What it DID lack was vertex shaders, so none of the heat haze from the flames.
I recently bought an MX 440 for my Win9x gaming PC. Looks like a made a good choice.
It's not a good choice cause no DX 8.0 hardware support on MX460. GeForce Ti 4200 was a much smarter and better choice (especially with 128 MB RAM)
Hardware Stores in Germany did not even stock those MX cards. Everybody got the Ti 4200.
Max Mustermann Lol except every Medion out there from that era in Germany has a GF4 MX 440 or 460, I've literally had a box full of them that I dumped, and still don't regret getting rid of. Absolutely awful cards.
They are great cards for DX7 and it’s disgusting that you threw them in the trash! Shame on you!
I had a MX440 overclocked with a big passive cooler. Very honest price and solid performance. I kept this card for years in several machines.
GeForce 4 MX was a card for cheap OEMs and people that didn't understand that it wasn't a proper GeForce 4, so the top model of this "con" made no sense
Back in the days I voltmodded the 440MX and overclocked it as high as possible. I don't remeber the exact clockspeeds but it was near to 360MHz.
I did'nt have any money back then, so I stuck with my Geforce 2 MX400 until I build my next computer. Going from a Duron 700 to an Athlon XP 2500+ @3200+ clocks with a Geforce 5700LE was a mighty big ypgrade in performance. The biggest leap ever for me now that I think of it :)
I put an MX460 in a PC I built for a friend and it died like 2 weeks later. They didn't have any more 460s in stock so we got a 440 and some money back instead.
I had a geforce 4mx 420 (with sdr memory that overclocked very high lucky, big help). It was a nice performance jump coming from a riva tnt 2 m64. When DirectX 8 games became the standard (and the 4mx was nog good anymore) i upgraded to a geforce 4 4200 Ti.
mx440 was my first graphics card :P
Same. But it was such a piece of junk for GTA San Andreas. 16 bit color is like cancer on that game.
At lowest graphical settings, it actually ran okay on the integrated gpu with 32bit color, whatever it was.
My first one was some isa card in 386dx.
Same. It was the best GPU of its time.
TheExileFox. I agree.
For GTA SA, an Intel integrated GPU was even better because of 32bit color
buy it again it goes for only 32 bucks on amazon :3
I owned the Radeon 8500 was a beast of a card back then most of my friends had the Geforce MX 440, but to be honest I never knew anyone with a 460.
Years later I got jealous of the 9700pro my friend had and then spurged on a Geforce 5700 ultra , sure it wasn't as fast as the 9700pro but I loved it.
I was very impressed with the 8500. Looking forward to checking it out in more detail.
PhilsComputerLab I ran it on a Athlon 1.3ghz IIRC , was a good pairing.
I also had the Radeon 8500 too but upgraded the system with an All in Wonder 9700 Pro graphics card.
This brings back memories... My very first hardware buy was an MX 420 (Made by Creative), the only decent gpu that I could buy at the time.
Turned out, when I learned to overclock, I had found a perfect starter to work on. After a fan was slammed on the heatsink, it took nearly 100 MHz extra on the core with no questions asked, and ran as an impromptu MX 460 for 4-5 years... it was a bit slower, not having DDR RAM like the 460, though.
The MX cards (like the GF2 MX400 and Ultras) could also do "hardware" wallhacking in Half-life engine games when running OpenGL mode with certain nvidia driver versions. This could only be detected by looking directly at the player's screen, as for everyone else, it looked normal...
I had one for 7 years and it went pretty good for me as it had dual VGA output and video capture and it Was very usefull. It even had dual BIOS! No GT 4200 had those features for the same price.
Phil, your the best. I have learned so much about an era I lived through. And the feedback in the comments take it to another level.Loving it.
Personally back when all this was happening every mag was telling you ATI was the way to go. So never had any experience with MXs or the FX5 series, because why buy a Trabant when you could go BMW.
However for me personally its good to learn about the Ge Force MXs and 5 series as I avoided them (like the plague) and only went ATI.
All this changed with DOOM 3. But maybe I am getting ahead of myself,
That's great. I did have a Radeon 9800 back in the day, but mostly I had Nvidia. The Radeon 4850 was also a top card. I'm getting more ATI cards for the future, so watch the space :D
That sounds good. I need to change what I said about the FX5 series. The 5700 was an excellent card, and if you could afford a good gaming laptop was the only Nvidia mobile card that could compete with ATI 9700. I think I had a 2nd hand Acer with it in and it rocked.
For the next few years I went Nvidia 6800, but the best of that era were the ATI 850 XTX's They cost £450 ! Each. Ouch.
But they were as fast as the Geforce 7900 of the FOLLOWING generation. which is pretty impressive all things considering.
They were the very first Crossfire set up, which you got in a big box costing £1000. Two 850's, all the cables and 5 games. Santa Claus didn't hear my prayers that year, nor did my boss.The next generation is gonna show up who are the fanboys of either side.
Cant wait!
Well I should have a 850 XT PE very soon :) I'm going with PCIe, much cheaper and easier to find parts. They can be had for a good price from eBay US at the moment.
It has to be PCIe for crossfire but yes the AGP card was what everyone wanted coz most people still had AGP and were pissed off with all the PCIe BS.
AGP bandwith was huge and had a lot of legs left in it. But shared cheap hyper memory was what the cheapskate industry moguls wanted to rip us off with.
But the concept of PCIe is sound, its just they chopped everybody off at the legs by introducing it so ruthlessly.
The Geforce 4 MX440 was a beastly card when it released. That card was my first real foray into DX cards and the start of my obsession with serious PC gaming. Before I used the MX440 I had been using the same Pentium MMX PC I built in high school. By the time 2002 rolled around I knew it was time to upgrade that 4 year old antique. The MX440 was one of the best price/performance cards out there. Max Payne ran very well on my Pentium 3 866Mhz and Return of Castle Wolfenstein was playable at some good details. I still game on those upper-low end cards today.
Of course I didn't use that MX440 very long. Once the Radeon 9xxx series launched the 9550 was such a sweet card for it's price. Vanilla WoW on a Celeron D and 9550. Man I miss 2005
I remember reading about the Geforce 4 line-up in the February of 2002 issue of PC Magazine (Greek Edition). The article's writer was clear that the MX cards lacked Direct3D 8 support. So, it was obvious to me that a gamer should go for either an MX440 (which was cheap) or a Ti 4200 (not so expensive as other Ti's, had support for pixel and vertex shaders). Unfortunately, my go to sources presented ATI cards less frequently, up until 9700 and 9500 were introduced.
That was good advice.
Oh the 9500 was awesome, especially since it was easy to bring it to 9700 levels.
The Ti4200 wasn't out at first; it was released a couple of months after the Ti4400 and Ti4600 when nVidia realized their mistake with the MX460. For the recommended price of the MX460 you could get a geforce 3 ti 200 quite easily. The Ti4200 was almost a mistake on the opposite end by nVidia; pretty close to ti4600 performance at half the price.
If only we had such mistakes more often...
I had a ti 4200 overclocked to clock speeds between ti4400 and ti4600 cards
To wait for the ti 4200 I continued using a Geforce 2 MX 400 overclocked until the ti4200 was available in Australia.
I had a gainward MX460,it was pretty good.To me its the most powerfull nv dx7 card it is-and it runs NFS U2 & MW very well!
My Dell from 2001 had this video card I was so glad I was able to play more games on PC since my last PC from 1998 was a Compaq Presario with an ATI Rage Pro which only gave me software render graphics and I remember playing GTA3 with no problems with this card it was amazing but then I had to upgrade to a Geforce FX 5500 for one game in 2003 that was Legacy of Kain Defiance because of features in Direct 3D that had T and L shading. After that I just kept gaming on PS2 which back in 2004 and 2005 blew my mind how they push that console.
I remember getting my first computer. It came equipped with an ABIT motherboard for Athlon XP processors, featuring an nForce Ultra 400 chip and an integrated MX440. Extremely good value at the time. Had to buy a better graphics card 2 or 3 years later when DirectX 8 & 9 were more massively used
huh, that 8500 was a freaking best.
it was the best card of its generation (which is the geforce 3 gen), but it wasnt THIS good back then. holy shit it improved a generation's worth of performance, even a couple in some games.
Yeah, I still have the LE version and a Ti 200 too. I never compared them myself and thought they might be about the same. It surprised me that it more often than not beats the Ti 500.
Back then I had an MX-440 paired with an Athlon 2600+. At first I was pleased to know that I have a GeForce 4, since some high-school colleagues still had a GF2 or even TNT-Riva. I played Return to the Castle Wolfenstein, NFS Underground 1&2, GTA Vice-City, Painkiller, Alien vs. Predator. It was a pretty good card. Later on, I upgraded to Radeon x550, which was better, but I wen to University, and I didn't have that much time for gaming, since the computer remained at my parrent's home. But I re-constructed that PC recently, with Windows XP, Athlon 2500+, FX-5500 and I started an older game, HL Blue Shift, which seems pretty interesting to play.
had 2500+ with mx440 this was a dirt cheap pc with amazing performance then. Important bit was WinXP 64bit.
I actually have this card in the Medion computer you talked about. Exactly! Nice video.
Ha i just did buy a beautfiul looking Packard Bell Machine (in Germany) with a Athlon XP2600+ (Barton Core), XP License, DVD Drive, Floppy Drive, 1GB DDR (2x512) PC2100/266 Ram, 120GB 7200rpm HD, and a Geforce 4 MX 460 64MB Dual VGA, S-Video In, Composite In for 31€ include Shipping :D
Just the Card alone cost between 13 and 20€ and is only 3 times listed on germany ebay.
Enjoyed that! love how much detail you go into Phil. where do you find the time to do all your research?!
Thank you! I work part-time this year, so got more time.
I had to do a double-take. I didn't think a game as new as Tomb Raider Anniversary would be able to play on a GF4 so I was about ready to comment about this, but it seems that the game does indeed run on those GPUs. And well, apparently! I miss these TR "Reboots" because they're far, far more fun than the nu-TR games which have turned Lara into a completely unlikeable killing machine going through ham-fisted emotional development and gameplay ripped from Uncharted. *Shakes fists at Square Enix*
Oh, sorry. Another nice video Phil, great job!
Thanks! In a previous video a viewer told me that the game has DX7 support, so it was a given to try it out! And it sure looks damn fine for DX7.
yeah i was like "wait, wasn't this game released in 2010 or something?" it looks too good to be running on that card, is it really?
Yea all the footage was recorded with this Medion MX 460.
OMG ive looked every where for the prices of the g4 mx cards and you have a promo pic. Now I finally know what the first graphics card i ever bought was. I knew I only spent a $100 in early 2000s. Doing some investigating and searching, NOW i remember. It was a PNY verto g4 mx 420. Geez finally.
I'd read all the reviews so knew the MX was a con. waited the extra time for the Ti4200 and was really pleased I did, was a huge upgrade for me. I think it clocked to nearly 4600 speeds too! It was however really noisy with the tiny high pitch fan so I ended up putting a big Zalman double sided passive cooler on it for silence :)
Yeah.. but the problem is that those cards were still too slow for dx8's shaders so at the end of the day you didnt get any better performance or image quality and you paid way more. Some of the later cards were much slower in dx7 than the mxs too which was a problem. You could choose 30 fps with dx8 or 45 with dx7, meanwhile you would get 50-60 with a mx....Same that happened later with the 9800 from ati, it was a pretty cool dx9 card but at the end of the day you wanted to switch back to dx8 if you wanted really decent performance...Same that happens nowadays with the first rtx cards... nice feature set with underperforming hardware to make any real use of it...
Nice Beetle! 9:03 I have a Geforce 3 ti 200 but I had to re-cap it. (it works again, but s.t. I rather put the voodoo3 in) But my MX460 keeps crashing in windows (DOS works, though). Love the review!
Update: You should revisit the Retro market for cheap Win98 3d cards again! For less than 20 Euro: GF3 ti200, GF4 MX440/460, GF4 TI4200, Radeon 9100
The MX440 was my first dedicated GPU, used to play a lot of CS, before that I suffered with an onboard Sis-530 8mb when playing CS and Quake 2. I remember running the leaked Doom 3 alpha with my MX440 all the way back in early 2003 and getting shocked of how revolutionary it looked with real projected shadows compared to anything that came before it, even at 640x480 and sub-30 fps it was amazing.
Excellent review dude, thank you so much!
I just picked up one of these for 18 euro plus shipping from Germany for my Shuttle XPC Windows 98 build. I'm currently using an FX5600 which is also really good but thanks to the manual texel alignment feature on this card I can play X-wing alliance without those ugly replacement fonts!
The MX 4xx video card line flooded the Brazilian market and sold a lot. Every cheap gamer PC came with this line.
Titanium models were rare and extremely expensive plus astronomical taxes.
I loved my GeForce 4 MX440. It had decent performance to me from what I remember.
If you wanted to play Doom 3 or Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and bought this thinking it was a cheaper Ti, you were pretty much screwed.
I remember that Neverwinter Nights also gave the 4 MX series cards a workout.
I did buy a Geforce 4 MX440 with 64MB from MSI, and I had it for a while. It was good performer for the money, and it was very easily overclockable, but I ended up selling it and getting a proper Geforce 4 Ti4200 128MB.
I remember skipping GeForce 4 because I had purchased at a bargain price a GeForce 3 - 500 with 64mb that was performing close to GeForce 4200 but GeForce 4 MX was selling like hotcakes because of the price and because many people didn't know the difference and believed the MX to be the real GeForce 4! Thank you for testing at 1280*1024 resolution! Love your videos man! hope you progress through the years and reach the GeForce 5/ Radeon 9 series :) !
Thank you! For sure, it's just a matter of time :)
Had a Mx440 on my sister's PC, she bought it in a rush and the only available models were MX440 and 7500LE ... I still cry at night about poor GPU choices made because of money and necessity to have something running (I also had a 9600SE and a 5700LE, then I said never again...)
Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!!!!! :) Amazing card!
Cheers, Phil!
It's a Pixel THING That's awesome thanks.
we all know why the 420 was slower :D
Yeee!! I have this Medion GeForce4 MX 460 in my collection! ))
One thing to mention is that this card also represents the last of the MX GPU's. After this, nVidia stopped using the name MX. Now days, cards like this make for interesting builds. I've noticed the 8500 cards are somewhat scarce now days as well. Probably the best thing that ever happened to ATI was AMD because of drivers. ATI had great hardware engineers, but their software team just had a hell of a time with drivers. ATI was good for drivers in the 98 and earlier days, but when 2000 hit, and NT became more mainstream, they, and a lot of other companies, Creative uh hem... SB LIVE... uh hem... ya..., had a very hard time wrapping their brains around how to get hardware working under NT. ATI could have been the dominant GPU if it hadn't been for the damn drivers frankly. Now days, ya drivers really aren't an issue with these older cards which is really nice. Being I was die hard NVIDIA back during this time period, I am more about ATI now days as my go to GPU for this era of hardware.
Speaking of nvidia, as you mentioned, the price of the GF4 Ti cards was quite expensive. This was about the time nVidia thought they could start really gouging for their GPU's. When I bought my Viper V770 Ultra, it was new, retail and cost $249 in the store. At that time, TNT2 Ultra was nvidia's top of the line GPU. Look at how nVidia crept their prices up over the years there for their top end gpu's, not counting Quadro of course, just mainstream gaming gpu's. I always thought nVidia was asking too much for their GPU's around this time, and still do frankly. Of course they are even MORE now days for the top end gpu. So many GF4 ti's have died over the years because of bad BGA's, in fact, that is where baking video cards started :)
I'm really eager to check out the 8500 in more detail, it seems to have aged well. When I was looking for one last year, I ended up with the AIW version, it seems to be overlooked.
AIW is all I ever see for sale. I haven't purchased one though because all of them I see for sale are the AIW 8500DV which is basically just an 8500LE and supposedly are underclocked due to the firewire port so I don't think they would overclock very well. I don't know why a true 8500 is rare, maybe they were not very popular. I see LE's for sale often though.
WaybackTECH Same. I got the FireGL version, but drivers are not great. NV does it better with Quadros to be honest, you can just use all the standard drivers. With the FireGL you can't.
Nvidia still uses the MX brand for mobile GPUs. MX150 is, I believe, the latest one.
I bought a GF4 MX 440 but it had some problems. The graphics looked raw and no DX8 support. So I went back to the store and changed it for a GF3 Ti200 and that was a good decision.
I got an ASUS GeForce 4 Ti4800 for 30 €... Would have been a lot less cheap back in the day.
And it was an upgrade from a (very noisy) GeForce 4 Ti 4600. :)
I love this card, it just works with DOS, 98, and XP and all the games I throw at it. It's also quiet (although the PC case I got helps a lot).
The universal AGP connector means I can put it everywhere, and the performance with the most demanding DirectX 8.1 games is very good. :)
I also have a very good ATI Radeon 8500LE, but some games don't like ATI cards. :(
It's basically just a GF2 MX just on steroids. I had a GF2 MX back in the day, I got a free GF4 MX440-8X for an upgrade, but after I got a GF4 Ti4200 that was something I could call an upgrade.
Upgraded also that later to Radeon 9700 Pro and damn that was fast.
I had a MX420 in my brand new Dell 4550. Only to realize like a year later that our old PIII system had a GF3 Ti200
Nice cards :)
I actually had the MX460 myself back in the day. I worked in the trade and got one at serious markdown. Never gave me any real trouble, but the most I taxed it with was GTA Vice City.
In my country in eastern Europe both the mx440 and the mx460 were very popular(probably not right at launch time,but a later when they got cheaper),i remember a lot of ppl were having them in their systems back then.They were even sold and ppl bought them as late as 2004.They had adequate performance and they were cheap,which was important in a country with low income.As a student back then it was a great difference between, what u wanted to buy and what u could afford.
Good point. And as you can see in the video, DX7 games run quite well, even later ones like Half Life 2 or that Tomb Raider game.
Me personaly never owned a geforce 4 mx,i had to squeeze everything i could out of my geforce 2 mx 400-64mb until late 2003,when i bought a fx 5200-128mb but with 64 bit bus,i was very proud that in need for speed underground my fx could render the people at the start of the race,while the geforce 4 mx couldn't :P
I never knew someone with GF4 Mx, at least in Eastern Europe people either bought GF2 MX if you were budget oriented or waiting and waiting and as for me I bought GF 5200 which was a really nice jump from GF2MX that most colleague had but many more supported features.
One other thing is nVidia released the same year NV18 GeForce4 MX440-8X with AGP8x with 275MHz GPU clock and most vendors produced it with 128MB 515MHz ram(Gainward had an 600MHz ram version GeForce4 PowerPack! Pro/600-8X XP 128MB Golden Sample) which technically made it almost as fast as the MX460 if not faster. Other important thing about the NV18 - MX440-8X was that it supported AGP Sideband across variaety of Chipsests while NV17 (MX420,MX440,MX460) still had issues using AGP sideband on some VIA chipsets (like KT133A) which is not a feature just to pass by.
So if you look for the fastest Celsius architecture GPU (GeForce 256 > GeForce 2 > GeForce 4 MX) look no further than MX440-8X it runs on AGP4x boards for sure and it is fully refined and free of problems (like the AGP Sideband functionallity) but be carefull there are alot of RAM variations from shity 162MHz (DDR332MHz) to lightning fast 300MHz (DDR600MHz) as the 256MHz (DDR513MHz) being the most common ones.
Because most techs/geeks knew it was going to be a slower version. Yes, it was basically the Celeron of graphics cards, compared to the regular GF4 versions. Practically all the MX versions really. That is what I sort of remember reading about. And that was 2 decades ago. Times flies.
I remember buying my first card in 2003, it was a G4 MX 4000, I didnt know it was a rebadged Geforce 2 and later learned that was a scam, then I get a 6200 GT. lol
I had a Ti4200, lasted me until 2008. Loved the card!
AFAIK they added the nv10 render path to Doom 3, because the GeForce4 MX 440 was quite popular, but I never heard much about the 460.
I actually stumbled across notes from Carmack when researching. He wrote to avoid the MX.
It was just a rare card.
And actually, I've seen Doom 3 running on Voodoo 2 SLI.
Just too big of an audience of MX440's to ignore, so they found a way to get it running. I distinctly remember running Doom3 on my MX440 and being blown away by the graphics, at a wonderful 5-10fps. I swear I heard that in order to get it to work, it was actually one of the very few games that used the Nvidia Shading Rasterizer, but I can't find any proof of this.
You can check out neo/renderer/draw_nv10.cpp in the source code to see how it works. It uses the fixed-function nVidia combiners via their OpenGL extension. I'm not sure about NSR, I haven't found any info on it beyond the press-release.
Actually everyone was wrong. Geforce 4 MX had great support and from today's perspective it was a great card. Geforce 3 or 4 Ti offered very little for the increased cost.
Thanks to the Geforce 4 MX, earlier GF 2 GTS, Pro and Ultra had prolonged life. Game developers had to support fixed-pipeline for a few years longer, actually allowing owners of the Original Geforce to use it until X360 was on the market.
Geforce 3 and 4 Ti faded away in the same time as Geforce 4 MX. There was very short period of games that required shader model 1.3. Game designers jumped very quickly to shader model 2 (DX 9b) requirement.
Oblivion was one of the first games to have shader 2.0 requirements and the year later Bioshock was out that required 3.0 shaders.
Geforce 3, 4 Ti and even 5 FX even though they had good shader support for their time were obsolete very quickly.
Radeons were even worse. Gamers with high-end X700 and X800 cards were furious since they only supported shader model 2.0 and Bioshock won't even run on them, like many others games that followed. Owners of GF 6600 or even 6200 128-bit could easily play those games on medium-low detail, while X700 and X800 cards were useless.
Nvidia was actually very clever with restricting shaders to high-end cards. That move allowed to sell cheap, but powerful cards that were hardware limited on advanced effects but in the same time they could push 60 fps in quite high resolution with good textures and complex geometry. They made low-cost cards good for gaming and in the same time they had desirable cards in the high-end market.
Very interesting perspective, thank you for sharing!
Oh the shaders on early DX 9 cards were a mess.
Radeon 9000 series supported DX 9.0
Geforce FX supported DX 9.0a (but not 9.0b)
Radeon R400 chips supported DX 9.0b (but not 9.0a)
Later Geforce and Radeon X100 supported DX 9.0c
Result was the usual fallback to plain 9.0 until 9.0c came along..
Some developers actually worked out render paths for all of it, but that was quiter rare.
Leeki85 hmm having owner a 4400ti, this card was much better than the fx5### series which were both hot and had very bad AA and performance was quite bad.
I went onto a x800 after and that was decent :)
You should add that both PoP: Warrior Within and Two Thrones had lower requirements and worked fine not only on Geforce 4 MX but also on Geforce 2. This is what I was talking about. Geforce 4 MX sold so well that game developers had to support it.
Requiring shaders in Sands of Time was actually a stupid decision since when you used a software that bypassed shaders game worked normally, the only difference was missing bloom and no water reflections. Very minor things in the game.
The one of the first truly shader based game was Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. It used shaders to much greater extend. Prior games relied on fixed-pipeline functions to draw geometry and they used shaders for simple post-process effects. Chaos Theory introduced shader based materials. If you used that software that bypassed shaders for GF 4 MX you would get a blank screen in Chaos Theory.
At that time games started to use shader model 2 anyway and support for Geforce 3 and 4 Ti was very rough. As I said those cards had no opportunity to shine. The only reason why early shaders were used in the first place was first Xbox that had Geforce 3 hardware.
When Geforce 4 MX was abandoned many gamers bought very popular Radeon 9600 or a cheaper 9550 one. Those cards along Radeon 9700 were the best Radeons ever made.
The FX5xxx series, with the exception of the leaf-blower FX5800 ultra which people still makes jokes about, was in retrospect not that bad, with very good performance in old-ish games and few games requiring SM2.0 until it was obsolete. In a win98 retromachine I'd pick a FX5700 or FX5900 any day over a 4x00ti card. The performance difference is quite small, until you turn on AA and AF, then the FX is miles ahead. Compatibility wise it doesn't make much difference.
If there's one think I can no longer stand it's a lack of AF. I can stand nearest neigbour filtering, noise and all, but I can no longer stand the blurry mess that is straight up bilinear filtering. The original voodoo 1 didn't even look like much of an upgrade to me; framerate is higher, resolution is higher, but the trade off was a blurry soup. In retrospect, you didn't have to use bilinear and could make quake or whatever look as good as in software mode, but I didn't know that. When I got my first graphics card, a cheap ass TNT2 M64, I just accepted that the bluryness was a sad fact of 3D graphics acceleration and acceleration was a must to make Half-life etc. run smooth.
Ever since I got my radeon 9800 I just turned AF to forced 16 X and I've not once in almost a decade and a half been tempted to turn off AF in any game.
I'm using an MX 440 AGP 8x card with my Celeron 400A 440BX 98se/2k build. Good general DOS compatibility, decent display quality on VGA, runs PII level DirectX/OpenGL games well in 32-bit colour, plays DVDs smoothly with PowerDVD 5, and is a version that comes with S-Video & DVI-I outputs for further compatibility with a wide range of displays. Currently using driver versions 56.64 for 98se & 81.98 for 2k as they work best without issues for my build, while also supporting widescreen as well at 1280×720 @ 60Hz for my widescreen display.
Nice, looks like a solid choice for your needs.
An interesting card to review would be the Radeon 9000 and the 9000 Pro, the Geforce 4 MX competition, they were cut down versions of the Radeon 8500 core, but still retained the DX8 features and got lower prices
Absolutely! I'm hoping Electromyne can help out, but worst case I will buy these cards myself.
I remember this period well. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago! O_O I remember that the Geforce MX series was really popular, and I encountered multiple people who thought that because they had a "Geforce 4" that they had an "awesome" video card, and I didn't have the heart to tell them that their card kinda sucked, wasn't a good value, and was actually worse than a Geforce 3 ti 200
MX420 was my first graphics card.
You described a choice I had to make when I built my computer in summer 2002. I went with a 8500LE - 128mb (Which I remember having the same clocks as the non LEs unlike the 64MB version.) It worked great and I wish I still had the bench marks I had taken when I bought it. Because it was the first piece of a complete new PC I was building that summer it spent about a month (while other parts were on order) in a AMD K6-2+ 500mhz computer. Talk about overkill but it soon went into a XP 2000+. Overall I had no clue what I was doing when I bought that PC but it was a good gaming PC for a kid still in high school. If I understood computer forums better back then I'd likely have gone used from someone who always had to have the best.
I think the Radeon was a good choice and it improved with later drivers.
Off topic, but are you Austrian Australian perhaps? Dialect sounds germanic but you speak like an aussie, it's a cool mix lol
yes
I'm actually quite impressed by the Radeon 8500 and 8500 LE performance once you use them with proper drivers. I bought a Radeon 8500 LE when it came out and it was kind of in between the Geforce 3 Ti 200 and 500 in terms of performance. When I see your results with more modern drivers I can clearly see that the old ones were holding back that GPU a lot! It was quite a monster when you realize that the Geforce 4 Ti 4200 is one gen younger and really struggles to get ahead the 8500, even the LE gives it a rough competition in some games.
Yes it's a unique card. One day I'd love to check out different drivers to see the progress, but such a project take a ton of time and in the end is a single slide...
I used to play WoW on this card back in 2004. It netted me
Radeon 8500 LE was a lot better deal due to it's native pixel shader support. I had to go with the 4 MX but that was because I had just a PCI slot.
a Radeon 8500 LE with a decent heatsink would overclock to 8500 levels and beyond.
In 2005 I got one from a friend, blown capacitors... I changed them and used for 3-4 months... then I got a FX5200 because not even GTASA run good on that MX...
My understanding was always that the price of the AGP version was too close in price to the Geforce4 Ti 4200, so it wasn't a good value. It got squeezed out by the MX440 below and the Ti 4200 above. The Geforce 3 Ti 500 was also becoming available on the used market, and it was also faster than the Geforce4 MX.
Got myself a dirt cheap gainward gf3 ti200 at that time (~may 2002). Overclocked it to 220/460, which most ti200 could easily achive, and used it until I bought a 9500pro in july 2003. Best bargain ever imo.
That was a good move IMO. You got DX8 compatibility and great performance. Amazing you remember the clock speeds, that would have put your card just ahead of the original GF3.
That card was worth every penny. It survived several socket A boards and was my backup card after the death of my 9500 pro. I even played doom 3 on it in 800x600@low (+ shadows, bump & specular maps) on a Tbred 2000+@2600+. Remember it running around 30ish fps.
I'm pretty forgetful though except it's related to work or pc hardware. :>
The MX 460 was positioned too close to the Ti 4200, and it got dropped from the lineup at the release of their AGP 8X refresh. The 8X version of MX 440 had higher clocks that nearly matched the MX 460. The 460 and 128-bit 440-8X (and their Quadro equivalents) are the ultimate D3D 3-7 cards to me.
Back in the day the MX440 was a great seller and people used it for CS and BF1942. Compelling and cheap. But after seeing your benchmarks, it shocked me, the Radeons were powerful back then. But the first one I touched for ATI was the 9500 and 9600 Pro in mates machines. One boarder eventually made a machine of a Prescot and a FX5900. Ran HL2 and Doom 3 rather well. I had a MX440 from a used rig and slapped in a ELSA 6600GT. Wasn't the best build quality I'd say and fully saturated the 350W generic PSU. We were young back then, $300 was as much as we can put out for a card. Wheres a family went back to China to pick one up. Maybe my era's are mixed up, will have to look into hardware timelines.
It can get confusing. ATI did a few 9000 series cards that aren't DX9 compatible for example :)
The pronounciation of Wolfenstein was perfect seriously i mean its wasnt at all pronounced like an english speaker :D
7:01 Gut :)
Back in these days I had a Radeon 7500 and went straight to the TI4200. The MX Line had no goot reputation. Only DirectX7 for a new card. Simply it was a very fast Geforce2.
There were titles that didn't support MX series as early as 2003, such as Silent Hill 3.
I scored a ti4200 really cheap last year and I'm so glad I jumped on it.
I think i bought the 4200 back in the day. I remember playing deus ex with it.
If I remember correctly, most of the GF3 Ti200 cards could be easily overclocked to GF3 Ti500 performance levels. That should have made that card a much better value than the GF4 MX series of cards, especially that 460. Unless you wanted to spend more (and get more performance) with the GF4 Ti200.
I remember kicking myself after I bought a GF3 Ti500 when I saw that the GF3 Ti200 could do that. I should have gotten that instead. Still was a good card and I didn't upgrade from it until my Radeon 9800 PRO AIW card.
True, but then you can OC the Ti 500 as well...
Fair enough, that makes sense.
smbu yea I had the Asus V8200 Ti200 Deluxe (GF3 Ti200) 64mb and I almost reached Ti500 levels when OCed.
I have that card still in my closet. I was so happy when I bought that GF3 Ti200 think I still have the beautiful box that came with it.
Too lazy to look back but I believe this series used some technology from 3DFX Voodo even the Nvidia FX 5600 when they were bought out from Nvidia.
The Radeon 8500 was one of the most wonderful card of all times, at least for me.
The GeForce 4 MX is a GeForce 4 in name only; it's a GeForce 2 MX with some of the GeForce 4 Ti's features, namely dual-monitor support and a 128-bit memory controller. It doesn't have support for programmable shaders.
I had MX 440 too, in one of my first PCs. It was literally everywhere,default option for all OEM PCs - cheap and mostly fine as start. Bad thing is that game developers wasnt that happy. A lot fo games was specially marked "not compatible with MX 4X0". In the end its deprecated very quickly.
Strangest thing is that peoples still purchase them on aftermarket. I know that a lot people just trowed these card in trashbin during upgrade.
If games didn't run on the MX, yea that would have been quite negative. I think for a while games supported several cards. In a future video I show this using Half-Life 2, you can run it in DX7 and DX8 mode.
CS/Q3 was THE thing then. And mx440 was the perfect card for these. Dirt cheap with 100fps for CS and 125fps for q3 with high picmic for 100hz monitor.
@@iclicklike3397 For that it was fine, yes. But just a little time later new generation of games was releasing and most of them barely worked on MX440. Crawled like snail in best case.
I believe its not reasonable to spend top price for top cards, they all de-valuate quickly but MX series little too cheap.
I have had a 460 back in the day and i remeber it quite well :)
Nice. Did it come with the PC, or did you buy the card separate?
It came with pc. It was gainward branded with one d-sub and one s-video. i have played even a chronicles of riddick on it
Nice video as always "thumbs up" what game is that showing up at minute eight???
I bought myself my first computer back then and it had the MSI GeForce4 TI 4200. I was very happy with it and it was used a long time. About three years I got a used Medion PC for cheap with that MX 460 and I was surpriced what I could do out of the box, but a few weeks later it got replaced by an Radeon 9800 Pro, also a great card, since that I prefer ATI/AMD GPU for main use.
At that time, I had replaced a fried gf2 mx4000 with a gf4 440.
I remember it having many grapical issues in games that I previously did not have
I got it recently about for 3 dollars and it replaced radeon 9250 bcoz had very low heat when I played quake. Bye~^^
I got a Leadtek Winfast GF4 MX440 as a warranty replacement for a faulty Creative GF2 MX DDR. It was a wonderful performer in terms of overclocking, I've managed to push 380 MHz on GPU with stock cooling and, IIRC, 550 MHz on MEM. Unfortunately overclocking was pretty much the only area it performed well, the overall performance was not as entertaining. I sold it, bought a Hercules 8500 128 MB... and I sticked with ATI/AMD ever since.
Notice how Doom 3 still has its fancy lighting on the MX 460 despite it being a DX7 card. The truth is, it's actually partially DX8 compatible, as it DOES have pixel shaders, albeit quite primitive ones. They are there because of the NSR (Nvidia Shading Rasterizer) but most devs were troglodytes and didn't take advantage of it.
John Carmack was not one of them, though. And he made a specific render path for the GeForce 2 series that takes advantage of it.
Cool! Thanks for sharing this nugget of information!
In a nutshell at the time it was 200$ for a card you could oc to 4600 levels of mhz in the 4200, or the glorified top of the trash heap mx.
This is around the era when I landed my GeForce 4... I got a test run on an ABIT MX 440, however, I ended ponying up more funds and invested in the big brother, the Ti 4600.
A graphics card that stayed with me through to the end of the Socket A era.
When people were on Athlon 64's and doing the swap to PCI-E, that was when I made my final AGP purchase, a Nvidia GeForce 7800GS, that one served my Athlon XP rig until its caps blew and I decided to go shopping, and landed on a Core 2 system.
Still if I had a much easier time getting the cards back then, I would have picked the ATi Radeon 8500, those benchmarks were just too good.
But knowing what I know today, sitting on the fence and waiting for the 9700 would have been more prudent.
Yea the 9700 was awesome. ATI's best card maybe? The Ti 4600 was a great card though, I can see how it lasted you that long.
A shame aboutr the board, why not replace the caps? The cheap caps are a somewhat common issue of that time.
I remember way back when I purchased a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 after selling my PS2 and moving away from console gaming while at college.
I had mx440 and that was one of the worst card i ever had. Lack of dx8 support killed that card very fast. I end up upgrading to GeForce4 TI 4200 AGP 8x 128mb. But back then i didnt have money for new GeForce4 TI or GeForce3 TI so only other choice was GeForce2 TI for similar money as MX440 so i choose MX440.
Had one back then and had very good time with it ;]
my first card was a radeon hd 7000. It was so slow, i could never really run any games. It was always choppy. Then i bought an mx440 from my friend at school for 40 dollars ( i sold my 7000 for 20) I just remember the upgrade was huge. I could finally run bf 1942, team fortress, and half life. And it would overclock so good ( added like 10 frames+) that i could play game on higher settings smoothly. Now i got a gtx 1080 ti lol. oh the nostalgia!