The GeForce 3 & the NV20 Demystified!

Friday, March 02, 2001

The features

  • nfiniteFX engine for full programmability
  • Lightspeed Memory Architecture for unmatched performance
  • Surface engine for high-order surfaces and patches
  • Programmable Vertex Shader
  • Procedural deformations
  • Programmable matrix palette skinning
  • Keyframe animation interpolation
  • Morphing
  • Fog effects:
        - Radial
        - Elevation
        - Non-linear
  • Lens effects:
        - Fish eye
        - Wide angle
        - Fresnel effects
        - Water refraction
  • Programmable Pixel Shader
        - Phong-style lighting for per-pixel accuracy
        - Dot3 bump mapping
        - Environmental bump mapping (EMBM)
        - Procedural textures
        - Per-pixel reflections
  • HRAA÷high-resolution antialiasing Featuring Quincunx AA mode
  • Integrated hardware transform engine
  • Integrated hardware lighting engine
  • DirectX ¨ and S3TC ¨ texture compression
  • Dual cube environment mapping capability
        - Reflection maps
        - Accurate, real-time environment reflections
  • Hardware accelerated real-time shadows
  • True, reflective bump mapping
        - Z-correct bump mapping
        - Phong-style lighting effects on bump maps with reflections
  • High-performance 2D rendering engine
        - Optimized for 32-, 24-, 16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes
        - True-color hardware cursor with alpha
        - Multi-buffering (double, triple or quad) for smooth animation and video playback
  • High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
        - High-definition video processor (HDVP) for full-screen,
           full-frame video playback of HDTV and DVD content
        - Independent hardware color controls for video overlay
        - Hardware color-space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)
        - Motion compensation
        - 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering
        - 8:1 up/down scaling
        - Per-pixel color keying
        - Multiple video windows supported for CSC and filtering
        - DVD sub-picture alpha-blended compositing
  • Operating systems
        - Windows 2000
        - Windows NT (all)
        - Windows 98, Windows 95
        - Linux
        - Mac OS
  • API support
        - OpenGL 1.2 and lower
        - DirectX 8.0 Version 1.1 and lower

    PERFORMANCE

  • 3.2 billion AA samples per second fill rate
  • 7.36GB/sec memory bandwidth
  • Lightspeed Memory Architecture amplifies memory bandwidth

    COMPATIBILITY

  • NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture
  • Fully-compliant professional OpenGL 1.2 support for all Linux ú and Windows operating systems
        WHQL-certified for Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows 98 Complete Linux drivers
         Mac OS

    Not a bad list of features, is it?

    That said, keep in mind that not all of these features will not necessarily be supported by all GeForce 3 cards on the market. Competition will inevitably lead manufacturers to include or drop certain bits, especially where video options are concerned. As a result, expect to see a number of cards to ship without such options as DVI in/out.

    Next: nfiniteFX.

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