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With the impending
release of any new product, there is an inevitable
barrage of spin and marketing hype surrounding it.
When
nVidia officially unveiled the GeForce 3, the
"spin-miesters" really went to work, as almost
every "high-tech" publication began touting the
new chip's capabilities and features.
There was something different about the GeForce
3's launch though. Usually, for every person
praising a new product you'll find another
condemning it. Ill fated 3dfx's launch of the
Voodoo 5 comes to mind, for every person praising
the quality of the Voodoo5's FSAA, another would
call it useless because of the performance
penalty. This was not the case when nVidia
announced the GeForce 3 and the capabilities of
their new "nFiniteFX" engine. The GeForce 3 is the
first truly DirectX8 compliant chipset, offering
new features, an improved memory architecture and a
new FSAA method. Virtually every developer and
industry insider was impressed by the GeForce 3,
claiming new levels of realism were finally
attainable on the desktop. It seemed the only
negative feedback was on the price, which was
supposed to hover in the $500+ range. Needless to
say, we were anxious to get one of these cards in
the HotHardware labs to experience it's capabilities first
hand.
Gigabyte was the first company to come through,
supplying us with a sample of their new GeForce 3
based GV-GF3000.
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| Specifications
Of The Gigabyte GV-GF3000 |
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Finally!
Something New! |
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GeForce3 FEATURES:
- nFiniteFX
engine for full programmability
- Lightspeed
Memory Architecture for unmatched
performance
- Surface
engine for high-order surfaces and patches
-
Programmable Vertex Shader
- Procedural
deformations
-
Programmable matrix palette skinning
- Keyframe
animation interpolation
- Morphing
- Fog
effects (Radial, Elevation, Non-linear)
- Lens
effects (Fish eye, Wide angle, Fresnel
effects, Water refraction)
-
Programmable Pixel Shader
-
Phong-style lighting for per-pixel
accuracy
- Dot3 bump
mapping
-
Environmental bump mapping (EMBM)
- Procedural
textures
- Per-pixel
reflections
-
HRAA?high-resolution antialiasing
- Featuring
Quincunx AA mode
- Integrated
hardware transform engine
- Integrated
hardware lighting engine
- DirectX
and S3TC texture compression
- Dual cube
environment mapping capability
- Reflection
maps
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Continued:
- Accurate,
real-time environment reflections
- Hardware
accelerated real-time shadows
- True,
reflective bump mapping
- Z-correct
bump mapping
-
Phong-style lighting effects on bump maps
with reflections
-
High-performance 2D rendering engine
- Optimized
for 32-, 24-, 16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes
- True-color
hardware cursor with alpha
-
Multi-buffering (double, triple or quad)
for smooth animation and video playback
-
High-quality HDTV/DVD playback
-
High-definition video processor (HDVP) for
full-screen, full-frame video playback of
HDTV and DVD content
-
Independent hardware color controls for
video overlay
- Hardware
color-space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and
4:2:0)
- Motion
compensation
- 5-tap
horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering
- 8:1
up/down scaling
- Per-pixel
color keying
- Multiple
video windows supported for CSC and
filtering
- DVD
sub-picture alpha-blended compositing
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CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE...
REFERENCE GeForce 3
If you have seen
reviews of any other GeForce 3 based cards, you're
probably thinking the GV-GF3000 doesn't look like
all the others...and you'd be
right. The card we received was a
pre-production model. Our contacts at
Gigabyte informed us that final shipping product
will have a different cooler on the chipset and heatsinks
on the RAM, similar to the reference board above.
Performance of the
final shipping product should be no different than
what you'll see on the next few pages. Here
at HotHardware, we prefer to review products that
are exactly what consumers would find at
retail, but we made an exception in this case.
(Please forgive us) :) There is some good that
comes from pre-production hardware though...
Easy access to the
components! Our board was using an A3
stepping GPU, final boards will be using the A5
stepping. The RAM was EliteMT DDR SDRAM
rated at 3.8NS. The default clockspeed for
the 57 million transistor core is 200MHz, while
the RAM is clocked at 460MHz (230MHz DDR).
What's the Big
Deal?
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