GeForce 3 - 7 way shootout (2/42)

Things are also moving at pixel level. The GeForce 2’s NSR (NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer) was only able to execute predetermined operations. Not so with the GeForce 3, which lets game developers create their own shaders, that can be run like small programs in the NSR. For the meantime, most users won’t see any benefits from this, since – as always with new technologies – their real-world or rather in-game application are either still in development or a few months off. Marketing-savvy NVIDIA made sure to have some tech demos ready at launch time, though, and they demonstrate these new features’ capabilities quite impressively. Most of them are available at NVIDIA’s downloads page. Game designers everywhere are falling over themselves praising the GF3’s programmability, excited at the new possibilities. Meanwhile, NVIDIA is trying to help the integration of new features into games along by offering some tutorials and tools on their developer pages. For us, this means that we can look forward to seeing some complex lighting and mirroring effects in upcoming games, with even motion blur and animation effects entering the realm of the possible.

Even if you’re more of a down-to-earth type that’s looking for more tangible improvement, you’re likely to be quite happy with this chip. The GeForce 3’s memory management has been completely overhauled. The 256 Bit memory bus can be subdivided into 4 x 64 chunks, making the transfer of smaller data packets over the bus much more efficient, since small packets no longer block the entire bus. Also, Z-buffer data is compressed in hardware before being sent to other parts of the chip, further reducing the amount of bandwidth needed. NVIDIA’s collective name for these features, which are aimed at ameliorating the bottlenecks that plague more conventional chip designs like the GeForce2, is "crossbar memory controller".

Last but not least, NVIDIA has integrated a new form of antialiasing, into the chip, called multisampling. This technique is slightly faster, but unfortunately, doesn’t look quite as good as weŽll see a few pages later.

Copyright: 12.06.2001 -   RIVA Station 2001 - Lars Weinand - Translation by Benjamin Kraft!
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