Reply 680 of 781, by ishadow
Geforce 4 MX was heavily criticized when it came out, but it wasn't a bad card. It got decent performance that allowed for 30-60 fps in new games at 1024x768 or even 1280x1024, but it lacked shaders, so you couldn't turn on every detail.
I had GF 2 GTS Pro back then and I could use this card for at least 2 more years thanks to GF 4 MX. Game developers had to make their games work on legacy fixed pipeline. The best example is Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, that had lower requirements than "Sands of Time". The latter required shader 1.1 but it's sequel worked fine on GF 4 MX and GF 2.
Geforce 4 MX came in a few variants. The slowest one was between GF 2 MX and GF 2 GTS, the fastest one was probably a bit better than GF 2 Ultra. It's really hard to compare those cards, since GF 4 MX used newer architecture with some improvements and in the same time it's bottlenecked with lower fill rates and halved ROPs.
Geforce 2 and also 4 MX had something called "Nvidia Shading Rasterizer". It was basically a primitive implementation of Pixel shader. Unfortunately no game used it, but as seen on Nvidia tech demos it was capable of doing per-pixel lightning, bumpmaps, shadow maps etc.
First Xbox got Geforce 3 with 1.1 shaders and games quickly adopted that. Wide compatibility with Radeons and other cards made all older per-pixel implementation obsolete. Voodoo 5 suffered the most. That card never got hardware T&L so in 2001 it couldn't even run new games, and it's per-pixel functions never had a chance to be implemented.
Doom 3 is the special case. This game is probably the most impressive title you can run on fixed pipeline hardware. There's no other game that on Geforce 2 or 4 MX has dynamic shadows, specular and bump-maps on every object.