The GeForce 3 & the NV20 Demystified!

Friday, March 02, 2001

For some time now, we've been hearing whispers concerning a new generation of graphics chipsets from Nvidia dubbed the NV20. Rumors, and innuendo have abounded but little hard information could be had. Now, we intend to take a long look at Nvidia's GeForce 3 latest creation, and see what's going on underneath its silicon hood.

The technical specifications

Nvidia recently released some details of the NV20 on their website, mostly concerning fabrication, which will allow us to get an idea of the performance that can be expected of their new GPU.

Here is a summation of the specifications of the NV20 chipset/GeForce 3:

  • Manufacturing process: 0,15 micron
  • Transistors: 57 millions
  • Ramdac: 350Mhz
  • Core frequency: 200Mhz
  • Calculating speed: 800 billion operations per second, 76 Gigaflops
  • Memory frequency: 230Mhz
  • Memory type & amount: 64Mb DDR
  • Memory bandwidth: 7.6Gb/sec.
  • Supported memory: SDR/DDR
  • Memory bus width: 128-bits - 256-bits
  • Texture pipelines: 4
  • Simultaneous textures per pixel: 2
  • Maximum number of textures per pixel in a single pass: 4
  • Maximum number of operations per pixel in a single pass: 36
  • Vertex by vertex instructions in a single pass: 128


    New features

    The GeForce 3 possesses a number of new characteristics and technologies that set it apart from the GeForce 2. Among them, we can include, the nfiniteFX, the Vertex Shader, the Pixel Shader, the Lightspeed Memory architecture, and High Resolution Antialiasing, which we'll be explaining in detail during the course of this article.

    Next: The features.

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