|
 "Board
Stuffing", that's what the industry affectionately
calls what the folks at
Visiontek do as their core
business unit. Otherwise known as "Contract
Manufacturing", in a nut shell,
Visiontek
will take a customer's "Bill of Materials" also
known as a BOM (lots of new lingo here eh?), procure
the raw parts (chips and circuit boards) and then
assemble the product. At that point they may
even box it up and ship it to their customer's end
customer. This way, companies like Elsa or
Hercules for example, can concentrate on designing
and marketing next generation products and leave the
manufacturing process to a company that is focused
on that one aspect and most likely better equipped
for it.
As you
can imagine, being a Contract Manufacturer or "Board
Stuffer" is sometimes a tough racket, so to speak.
Margins can be razor thin and the environment cut
throat with many competitors in this space.
It's no wonder Visiontek looked to expand into other
areas that would help bolster profitability.
As a major supplier of manufacturing services for
nVidia based graphics products to OEMs, Visiontek
was already pumping reference design boards through
their chip shooters at a blinding pace. As a
result, it was a natural for them to take ownership
of their own product in this space and bring it to
market.
The
following is a HotHardware look at the Visiontek
GeForce3 Graphics Accelerator. Made here the
USA, let's see what good ol' American ingenuity
brings to the table.
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| Specifications
and Features Of The Visiontek GeForce3 |
|
A straight
up reference design |
|
Architecture
Features
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
|
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
|
The box and contents for
this board were a little bland. Only the card,
drivers and install guide were included.
Here's what our board looked like.
click
for full view
As you can see, our
board came equipped with a TVOut feature connector.
Most GeForce3 cards you'll see on the market will at
least have this feature and/or possibly digital flat
panel output as well. The board is clean with
all components neatly aligned in their respective
sites and solder connections crisp.
Visiontek's quality manufacturing process is fairly
obvious with this well built card.
As you can see in the
above feature list, the GeForce3 has many new
capabilities with its Programmable nFiniteFX Engine,
Pixel and Vertex Shaders. Let's have a look at
what these news toys can bring to the 3D Gaming
experience.
Drivers,
Features, Screenshots and Demos
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