The
GeForce 3 chip is graphics chip maker
Nvidia's successor to the
GeForce 2. It is a substantially reengineered piece of hardware, sharing a number of innovations with the more customized component that is slated to power 3D graphics in
Microsoft's
XBox. With
3dfx eliminated and
ATI as a latecommer and at best a dark horse, expect this card to be the mainstay of home computer graphics accelleration.
The trend towards offloading more and more work towards the graphics hardware is taking a rather dramatic leap with their new architecture, centering around a programmable geometry engine and rendering system, what NVidia calls a Vertex Processor and a Pixel Processor, respectively. Software developers are expected to "customize the chips" - I can't tell you yet just how such customization will work, but you can think of them as two new specialized CPU's, with all the attendant benefits (incredible power) and pitfalls (nightmarishly complicated to program against) such systems usually have.
Other hallmarks of the new design are expected benefits of the move to better fabrication techniques and overall maturation of the design principles involved. The system is substantially faster despite a decrease in core clock speed; the anti-aliasing system is improved. The memory architecture is based on four controllers which operate in parallel. Reminiscent of NUMA, each controller is associated with a bank, but other banks are accessible for load balancing. Texture compression is now the norm, and a new kind of z-buffer occlusion culling is being used to optimize rendering.
As most of you know, NVIdia is about as in bed with Microsoft as you can be. The features on the card are tied intimately to DirectX 8. This is potentially bad for OpenGL, the platform-agnostic alternative graphics API developed by SGI and popularized by id software, and thus bad for Apple and Linux.
Lest you think NVidia is just fucking around, take a look at some numbers:
57 million transistors
12x12mm die size
Fabbed at 0.15 micron
800 billion ops per second
76 billion floating-point ops per second
Up to 36 pixel shading ops per second
Fully anti-aliased Quake III at 1024x768 in 32-bit colour runs to
over 70fps
Quake III frame rate over 117 per cent faster than GeForce 2 Ultra (previous generation card)
Sources: theregister.co.uk, nvidia.com