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Preview of The GeForce 256
Tor Arne writes " Gamecenter is doing a preview of the Nvidia GeForce 256. Not as amazing as it initially sounded, it's still pretty amazing looking."
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However, games will need to be specially written to take advantage of this geometry acceleration.
This is only true if you were unfortunate enough to write your game using Direct3D. OpenGL games will be able to take advantage of geometry acceleration without even recompiling. You reap what you sow when you use a Microsoft API.
Whether or not hardware T&L is of any benefit to current or future games is yet to be seen though. Games lately have been getting more and more fillrate bound and less geometry bound, as game creators take advantage of higher resolutions and larger textures.
The GeForce, on the other hand, supports up to
128MB of local graphics memory. Hardware T&L greatly increases the amount of onboard memory needed. The first boards aimed at consumers should come out at 32MB, with 64 MB and 128MB cards to follow later on.
No facts to back this claim up. How exactly does hardware T&L increase the amount of onboard framebuffer required? With AGP, there really is no need for local video memory at all, except to use for the actual visual screen, and maybe as a texture cache. Sure the geometry system will need somewhere to cache scenes, but to fill up 128MB with just _geometry_ information you'll need something as complicated as that huge landscape scene in the Matrix.
Texture compression allows the use of much more detailed textures without overburdening graphics memory or bus bandwidth.
My jury's still out on texture compression. For games that are poorly written (i.e. that load and release textures on the fly, each frame) compression can help, but for games that use a more intellegent caching scheme for texturing, there really isnt much of a point.
Like the TNT2, GeForce supports the AGP 4X standard.
Definitely "A Good Thing".
The GeForce also introduces a new feature, cube environment mapping, that allows for more realistic, real-time reflections in games.
Similar to the Matrox G400's env mapped bump mapping but not quite the same.
Other things to note: 4 texel pipes (fills at four times the clock rate). Watch for all the other chip makers to do this too, limit of 8 lights in hardware (what happens when a scene requires more than eight? They don't say.. hmmm......)
Basically nVidia is gambling with hardware geometry. The gamble is, that future host cpu's (Pentium-4's or whatever) will not be able to beat them in doing transformation and lighting, and that if they don't, gamers are going to really even benefit from T&L. We'll see if that pans out. Unless they have a very sophisticated ALU on that chip, it will doubtlessly only speed up certain types of scenes. (We've all seen the "tree" demo).