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nVidia's GeForce 256 Breaks Out; changes 3D world

Posted by Hemos on from the so-purty dept.

Hai Nguyen writes " nVidia officially unveiled the GeForce 256 (the chip formerly known as NV10). Its architecture emphasizes both triangle rate and fill rate, so the chip can render 3D landscape with highly detailed 3D environments and models, and smooth framerates. Go get the full info." Holy moses. I want one. Now.

1 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Analysis (minus fluff) by aheitner · · Score: 5

    So basically nVidia chose to make a high fill-rate card with hardware lighting and transforms (geometry acceleration). These aren't innovative directions -- they were the obvious ones. None the less, the other major player, 3dfx, has pulled back from these choices. I'll explain why:

    nVidia has a card which can do supported operations fast. It obviously has a lot of fill. It'll be a good board. Of course it'll still be slow in D3D ... everything is (we once demonstrated that it's physically impossible under DX6 to be faster than a Voodoo3 under Glide). There are some downsides: if you want to do crazy weird stuff with your lighting (eg. wrong faster stuff, funky effects) you may not be able to get it to work. Similarly with geometry -- special fast cases will become normal cases. So there may be a 50%-100% gain in triangle rate, but it's unlikely geometry acceleration will ever be able to provide much more than that.

    nVidia seems to have chosen not to support the hardware bump mapping of the Matrox G400, an extremely high fill (runs beautifully bump mapped in a window in 1600x1200x32bpp) card without geom accel. 3DLabs' long awaited Permidia3 will also have some kind of hardware bump. IMHO this is a relatively flexible feature -- you could do a lot with it. It remains to be seen how flexible nVidia's lighting and geom turn out to be.

    I'll be impressed if D3D ever delivers real hardware geometry benafits. We have yet to see a single benefit of DX6 over DX5 (not screwing with the fp control word especially) actually work. I'm highly suspect of anything MS sez.

    So what about the remaining behemoth, 3dfx? Their Voodoo4 is supposed to be an extremely high fill card (fill has always been their hallmark). It may not support any more hardware features (eg. bump, lighting, geom accel), but it will fill like crazy. It's supposed to do full screen anti-aliasing ... 3dfx talked about putting a geometry accelerator on V4 but I believe they backed off from it. Voodoo4 is however still an SST and therefore still a true descendent of the original Voodoo chipset conceived as a flexible, long-term solution for both PCs and arcade games.

    I'm eagerly awaiting the new generation. But I expect the real crazy stuff to start happening in the following generation ... it may be finally time to kill some very old paradigms in 3d hardware...