GeForce 256 Roundup
Nov, 1999

Difficult to get, too hot to handle.


If I had a company that sold video accelerators, I'd probably have sleepless nights and pop antacids every hour or so over Nvidia's new GeForce 256. Nvidia is in an enviable position from a technology as well financial point of view. They are the first to deliver the next-generation 3D chip, several months ahead of the rest, at that. Although S3 is about to ship the first Savage 2000s at the time of this writing, they still place a distant second. Nvidia's fiercest competitor, 3dfx, is still working on VSA-100, and it is not expected until the middle of the year. Hanging far back from the leader are Matrox and ATI, both of them still stuck with RIVA TNT2-generation accelerators. Permedia, Intel, 3DLabs and the others seemed to have retired from the race.

Needless to say, the suits at Nvidia are probably flashing their widest pearly-white smiles from all the green bucks the GeForce will bring into the company war chests.

So what's the lowdown on this new graphics card that Nvidia so proudly flaunts?

The GeForce 256 incorporates many "firsts": the first 256-bit 3D processor, the first to implement a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, and the first four-pixel rendering pipeline. The GeForce is also the first graphic accelerator to take advantage of Microsoft's new API, DirectX 7.0, which features cube environment mapping, projective textures and vertex-blending. The GeForce 256 has nearly 23 million transistors in it, more than twice the complexity of the Pentium III processor.

In english please…

When computer games create a 3D scene, the process is divided into two main stages: geometry/lighting and rendering. Before the GeForce 256 chip, all the floating-point-intensive math that converts the coordinates of an object into coordinates for its position in the scene is done by the CPU. The graphics card then takes over as it draws the scene, creating the triangles and filling in those triangles with textures.

With a GeForce accelerator inside the computer, all that math is done by the video card rather than the CPU. Because the CPU now has a lighter workload, game designers can now flood the video card with highly-detailed 3D scenes and objects, and with lighting is more complex. The added details and the complex lighting translate to more realistic environments like mist or fog. A character's face, for example can be made more realistic with 3D noses, eyes and ears instead of artwork.

Does it work?

Most of GeForce's new technology will not be noticeable in games using old 3D techniques. Games will need to be written specifically to take advantage of GeForce's geometry acceleration. Up to now, all games use what is called a software T&L engine. The new DirectX 7.0 API will support GeForce's hardware T&L through Direct3D.

Actually, implementing hardware T&L equation on games can be very tricky. Games will need to use higher polygon counts for users with hardware T&L acceleration, but still the game designers must not forget the users of lower-end systems - they need low level details as well. It's a delicate but necessary balancing act, because it's suicide to design a game solely for the hardware T&L crowd!

So current games like System Shock 2, for example may not appear radically different than it does on a RIVA TNT2. But the frame rates, though will be much faster - which brings us to the next topic, Fill Rates.

The Four Pipes

Fill rate is the speed at which a graphics card can perform the final rendering process. One way to increase fill rate is to increase the parallelisms of the graphics processor. The GeForce contains four pixel pipelines, compared to the two pixel pipelines on the TNT2 or Voodoo3 boards. The added pipelines are used for Multi-texturing, a technique that produces realistic lighting and shadow effects. With four pipelines, the fill rate is higher because four multi-texture passes can be performed in a single clock cycle.

Is it worth it?

If you already have a RIVA TNT2 or Voodoo3 graphics card, there's no real need to buy an expensive GeForce card now. Though you may notice a speed boost, especially at high resolutions and color depths, the GeForce's potential will only shine through with games that takes advantage of its hardware transform and lighting. Some of the new games that support hardware T&L are Messiah, Oni, Vampire: The Masquarade, and Heavy Metal: FAKK2. Developers should be ready to release them in the next six months. Until then, you can wait and pray that the price of the GeForce drops because the last time we checked, it was rather steep.

If you're buying your first PC, then the GeForce 256 is an excellent choice. Check out the next section, Bring on the big guns! before you burn your money.

Bring on the big guns!

The GeForce is the most powerful video accelerator in the market today, and it will probably stay that way for another three or four months. Of course, it's always wise to wait for 3dfx's next offering, especially for those who crave for speed rather than beauty. Don't shut the door on GeForce cards yet; the news is that the next-generation 3dfx cards will not offer hardware T&L, which is good news for Nvidia.

For the discriminating gamer who demands the best, the GeForce may be the only 3D accelerator card in the industry that has hardware T&L, awesome 3D performance and stunning image quality in one complete package.