Visiontek GeForce3

The Light Speed Memory Architecture

Realistic 3D scenes contain a lot of information that needs to be handled and rendered. Thus loads of information had to travel to and fro through the AGP bus form the 3D Accelorator and the CPU. The amount of information that could be carried at a time was limited due to bandwidth limitations.

With the introduction of the GPU generation this problem was solved to a degree as most of the computation load of 3D rendering was moved away from the CPU and into the GPU. Thus the amount of information that needed to pass through the AGP bus was lessened paving the way for greater efficiency.

The Advanced Light speed memory architecture incorporated in the GPU takes this to the next level. By representing complex geometrical scenes as a high order surface and rendering and computing the scene entirely on the GPU the G Force 3 Reduces the information transfers in the AGP bus solving the memory bandwidth problem. It also incorporates a cross bar based advanced memory controlled to solve the internal memory bandwidth problem.

Also apart from the Light speed memory architecture the G Force 3 also has the words fastest DDR memory interface which can achieve a bandwidth of 7.36GB per second insuring that there are no bottle necks within the GPU.

HRAA (High Resolution Anti Aliasing)

Anti aliasing is the solution for jaggies and rough edges that you see on 3D rendered image. These imperfections take the realism out of such images. The solution to the problem was mostly solved by increasing the resolution of the scene so that more pixels will be used when illustrating the scene thus doing away with jagged edges. But this is not always feasible, thus anti aliasing was introduced.

Super sampling was the first approach to anti aliasing that 3D chip designers took to anti aliasing. This approach was used in the G Force 2 and contemporary graphics processors. Super sampling involved processing the scene at a much higher resolution and then filtering it back to the desired resolution. This was a brute force technique that needed a lot of computational power, processing time and thus the cost in the end was performance.

As I mentioned before the G Force 3 unlike its predecessors does not rely on brute force techniques to get the work done, thus the solution to jaggies from the G Force 3 is a technique called Multisampling.

Multi sampling is a more complex technique than super sampling. It involves taking multiple samples of a pixel before the GPU decides on the final pixel color and shading. These multiple sample pixels act as virtual pixels in the image. This is only possible by using a highly sophisticated graphics processor with wide data paths within its core to handle such loads of information. The G Force 3 is able to achieve High Resolution Anti Aliasing without compromising performance, due to it’s wide data paths and high memory bandwidth.

 

HDVP

The NVIDIA G Force 3 GPU also has support for high definition Television through it’s high definition video processor. This will enable user of the G Force 3 to use their GPU for much more than just playing games, and to enjoy the pleasures of digital real time television.

The above mentioned are just a few of the various technical innovation featured in the G Force 3. We didn’t want to bore you with all the technical details. All in all the G Force 3 represents a leap in the 3 D graphics industry equivalent to the leap it achieved when the Voodoo graphics processor was launched so long ago, in relation to new technology introduced. In Short Pc Games will never look the same again after the G Force 3.

By incorporating the unified driver architecture, NVIDIA has also made the G Force 3 backwards compatible with all current and past games. It also features full support for DirectX 8.0, Open GL, Direct 3D and other video standards.

But don’t take my word for it, read on and you will find out what this baby can really do as Technoyard put to the test our newly received G Force 3 based product by Visiontek.

 

GeForce 3 Specifications:

Controller	nVidia GeForce3
Bus Type	AGP 2x/4x compliant socket
Core Clock	200MHz
RAMDAC	350MHz
API Support	Open GL 1.2 and lower, DirectX 8 v1.1 and lower
Connectors	VGA and TV/S-Video out
Memory	64MB
Memory Type	DDR SDRAM
Memory Clock	460MHz
Memory bandwidth	7.36GB/sec

 

• 3.2 Billion AA samples per second fill rate

• 31.25 million triangles per sec setup

• 0.15 technology

• 57 million transistors

• 4 rendering pixel pipelines

• Hardware T&L with 76 GFLOPS performance

• nfinite FX engine for full programmability

• Programmable Vertex Shader

• Programmable Pixel Shader

• Integrated hardware transform engine

• Integrated hardware lighting engine

• Dual cube environment mapping capability

• Hardware accelerated real-time shadows