Tuesday, August 31, 1999

NVIDIA Announces the GeForce 256 -- 10:40 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

The GeForce 256 (aka the chip formerly known as NV10) was unveiled to the public today. Here's the specs for you pointy-headed types, which I nabbed from Riva3D's GeForce page:

• 15M triangles/sec - sustained DMA, transform/clip/light, setup, rasterize and render rate
• 4 Pixels per clock (4 pixel pipelines)
• 480M pixels/sec fill rate - 32 texture samples per clock, full speed 8-tap anisotropic filtering.
• 8 hardware lights
• 350 MHz RAMDAC
• Most feature complete for DX7 and OGL - Tranform & Lighting, Cube environment mapping, projective textures, and texture compression.
• Will utilize 4x AGP performance with Fast Writes , which enables the CPU to send data directly to the GPU (1 GB/sec transfer rate), increasing overall performance and freeing the system memory bus for other functions.
• 256 bit rendering engine
• Highest quality HDTV (High Definition Television) video playback
  • High Precision HDTV video overlay
    • 5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps
    • 8:1 up/down scaling
    • Independent hue, saturation and brightness controls in hardware
  • High bandwidth HDTV class video I/O
    • 16 bit video port
    • Full host port
    • Dedicated DMA video
  • Powerful HDTV motion compensation
    • Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution
    • Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel
• Enables the PC to compete with the Playstation 2 as a major entertainment platform.

Whew! Creative Labs has already announced a new product based on the GeForce 256. Check out Riva3D's GeForce FAQ, GeForce Technical Papers, and GeForce demo shots.

The really cool thing about this new chip is that it offloads so much work from the CPU that you can keep your old system up-to-date by simply replacing your video card instead of a whole new motherboard/CPU/video card. I think I've found my next video card :). BTW, This news update wins the award for "most HTML ever used in a news blurb."

News for 08/31/1999

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