Info from Elsa.com
-
Powered by NVIDIA GeForce3—up to 3 times faster than GeForce2 Ultra
-
nFinite FX™ engine—fully programmable effect processor for
realistic 3D representation, e.g. volumetric fog, particle effects,
reflective bump mapping and animated water surface
-
Full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA)—no more pixel edges, even at high
resolutions
-
Light speed Memory Architecture™ for never seen before 3D
performance
-
64-MB DDR SDRAM with 460-MHz effective memory clock and 3.8 ns access
time
-
TV-out for games and DVD movies on TV
If you can afford it you wont be disappointed in it. By
far the fastest card out, and by far the most expensive card out. the
ability to let games programmers free to create there own rules is a big
step forward which will allow far better quality games to hit the
market. The nFinite FX engine allows this to happen by not having such a
strict set of programming rules. Games written for DirectX 8 and the
Geforce 3 should be out by late 2001. It wont be until then that you
will really see what the Geforce 3 can do.
HRAA
Next on the list of Features is the HRAA - High
resolution Anti-Aliasing featuring the new Quincunx AA. with entering
into too much detail (as there are many sites out there with massive
detail) the Quincunx design is said to give an 4x AA performance with
only the performance hit of 2x AA. The idea is that this way of
Anti-Aliasing "looks" at the surrounding pixels and decides (I
use that term loosely) what would be the best way of removing the jagged
edges. In reality the speed drop in terms of frame rates is only that of
a 2x AA, the quality however is slightly blurry compared with that of a
4x AA. Looking at it though you can only tell this by comparing it to a
4x AA image.
nFinite FX
The nFinite FX engine is the heart and soul of the
Geforce 3, as previously stated it allows programmers more freedom to
create more special effects. to Do this the Geforce 3 has a programmable
vertex shader and a programmable Pixel shader. Nvidia is offering
example to programmers of how to use this new engine but the real beauty
in it is once learned the programmers will design there own special FX
and will likely amaze us all. Nvidia learned from its mistake with the
Geforce original where programmers eventually gave up writing special
code to keep up with the very first GPU. wasted technology, but no
longer!
Chipset Details
-
57 million transistors
-
64MB DDR SDRAM (3.8ns memory chips)
-
200MHz core and 460MHz memory frequencies
-
3.2billion AA Sample per second fill rate
-
7.36GB/s memory bandwidth
-
350MHz RAMDAC
-
Light Speed Memory Architecture amplifies memory
bandwidth
-
Geforce 3 nfiniteFX Engine
-
API (OpenGL 1.2, DirectX 8.0 Version 1.1)
-
TV-Out
-
High Quality HDTV/DVD Playback
-
High-Performance 2D Rendering Engine
-
True Reflective Bump Mapping
-
Surface Engine For High-order surfaces and patches
-
Programmable Vertex Shader
-
Programmable Pixel Shader
-
HRAA (High Resolution Antialiasing)
-
Integrated Hardware Transform Engine
-
Integrated Hardware Lighting Engine
-
DirectX and S3TC Texture Compression
-
Dual Cube Environment Mapping Capability
-
Hardware Accelerated real-time shadows
