First Look: NVIDIA GeForce 3 (1/6)
Originally I had planned to publish a full-blown preview / review here upon the official launch of the GeForce 3. Unfortunately, despite the delayed launch (NV20 was originally meant to launch on Jan. 8, 2001), NVIDIA was unable to fix me up with a review sample. Only a few select US sites were able to get a hold of these elusive cards, but even their reviews lack any hard numbers or benchmarks. Those that have postet numbers claim to have received them from mysterious third-hand sources (Deep Throat from X-Files, maybe???). The reason for this lack of cards is supposedly a flawed board (PCB) design. Other sources claim that the driver is still in an early beta stage that would not permit conclusive testing. That leaves us with what the marketing department has fed us so far. Despite the fact that I have received loads and loads of documentation and whitepapers from NVIDIA, I refuse to publish a preview based on promotional material. You won't find this kind of pseudo-review on RIVA Station!!
A "real" GeForce 3 review will follow as soon as we have a real board to review, as I don't believe in blindly following the "4 - 7 times faster" hype that's going around - I prefer to arrive at my own conclusions. Nonetheless, the GF3 promises to be a high performing chip that has little to nothing in common with its predecessors. Weighing in at 57 million transistors, this chips has more than twice the transistor count of the GF2 GTS (25 million). A short overview of the chip's capabilities:
Game developers see the GeForce 3 as a performance revolution equal to the introduction of the original Voodoo 1, which revolutionized 3D gaming in its day. The magic word here is programmability - or in marketingspeak: nfinite FX Engine. The GeForce 3 is a completely new design, bringing a programmable pixel shader and a T&L engine with a programmable vertex shader to the table. NVIDIA even goes so far as to call this a Vertex Processor. |
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Copyright: 27.02.2001 -
RIVA
Station 2001 - Lars Weinand Translation by Benjamin Kraft URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/gf3_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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Looks like it's going to be a hot summer
this year! In the recent past, NVIDIA, now undeniably market and technology leader in the
home and office market, has shipped products to its performance-hungry gaming audience on
a six month cycle abd released a new graphics chip every 12 months. The milestones to date
are the TNT, TNT2, GeForce 256 and the GeForce 2 GTS. Now, once again, it's time for
something new: The GeForce 3. Originally, this new chip was supposed to bear a completely
new name to mark the new architecture, but obviously the marketing people played it safe
and wanted this chip to benefit from the well-known GeForce brand name.
