...And its name shall be GeForce FX. nVidia today put an end to rumours and hearsay by officially announcing that their top-end card, formerly known as NV30, will henceforth be referred to as GeForce FX. As a result of the announcement, details of the card, leaked by a variety of sources, suggest that the chip will be the fastest yet. The story so far: -nVidia decided to use the .13 micron process for the new card. This led to a costly delay, in order for technical difficulties to be overcome. The advantage of the process however, is that the chip will not be limited to 400MHz and nVidia insiders are fairly sure that it will peak around 500MHz. -GeForce FX will also use DDR II memory running at 500MHz or 1GHz effective, making it the fastest memory so far. -nVidia's new baby will feature eight pipelines and two TMU's, one more than ATI, allowing it to render 16 textures per pass. -Design efficiency will allow the card formerly known as NV30, to produce 200 million triangles per second. -The new chip will deliver 48 GB/s, double what ATI's RADEON 9700 PRO does, even though it does use DDR 256 bit memory, nVidia will use 128 bit memory. -According to nVidia, fast machines should yield a score of 21000 to 22000 on 3dmark 2001 SE. -Again, according to nVidia, color precision will better what was used on Toy Story 2 by utilizing film-quality color precision, producing higher precision 64 and 128 bit color.
Computer games today are fast and exciting, yet they still lack the ability to engage us emotionally, said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. With the GeForce FX GPU, game developers now have the power to create awe-inspiring visuals and bring character emotion to life. GeForce FX enables a new type of interactive expression we call cinematic computing. The word cinematic is the term both graphics competitors have decided to focus on. Admittedly it adds a very exciting concept to gaming, even suggesting, ever so slightly, that games on these new cards will seem like movies. The nVidia GeForce FX GPU is the result of ten years of passionate effort by the best 3D graphics engineers in the business and includes technologies invented at NVIDIA and 3dfx, Huang continued. The GeForce FX GPU delivers unprecedented 3D graphics performance and the NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture ensures the reliability and quality that has become the hallmark of NVIDIA GPUs.
What the endless list of features does, is to sugar-coat the pill, the active ingredient of which is its price, which will confine the new card to existing merely as the drooling center-piece of most PC hardware stores.
The launch of the new card was followed by a strong sign of support by the gaming industry almost in its entirity. To find out which luring upcoming titles will feature enhanced support for the new chip, read on by following the link below and to your right...
