nVidia NV3x Sneak Peek

zoobaby writes "Here is a sneak peak at nVidia's upcoming line of cards. No hard specs, but some nice notes on changes from current NV2x to NV3x, also some very nice screenshots to show off what it will be capable of." In related news, Tim_F noticed that memory manufacturer Crucial is entering the video card business with their first card based on the ATI Radeon 8500le.

Comments

So, 3. 5 years it'll be necessary

[Quarters]

"My current work on Doom is designed around what was made possible on the original GeForce, and reaches an optimal implementation on the NV30. My next generation of work will be designed around what is made possible on the NV30."

The GF cards came out 1999ish (give or take). No matter how fast and furiously the hardware manufacturers pump out new silicon there is always a long adoption cycle for any new concepts. Game developers would be pretty thick headed to close out an installed base of X just to support a feature on Y (where Y is an extremely small value compared to X) cards.

It doesn't matter how earth-shattering the NV30 will be. It's complete feature set won't be utilized anytime soon. The GF3/4 cards still has long lives ahead of them.

Thinking it's a forgery

[Viking Coder]

Given this "nVidia rendered image" and this BMRT rendered image, I see three possibilities.

One - the guys at nVidia painstakingly translated each aspect of the original image to Cg.

Two - the guys at nVidia have some technology that translates RenderMan to something they know how to render. It could be RenderMonkey-like technology. It could literally be RenderMonkey, with some nVidia back-end. It could be they contacted the original artist, John Monos, and took his original data and reformatted it (skipping RenderMan, entirely).

Three - the images are a forgery.

I'm betting on Three.