GeForce 3

[YMAN]

Is the new GeForce 3 any good?

If anyone has one, we all would like some input!
Tell me what you think!
What is your 3dMark score?
Is it worth buying in YOUR opinion?
Are there any probloms?
Who made your card ex. PNY , Visiontek...
What did you pay for it?
Was there a major diference from your old card?

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK!

:) :( :mad: :rolleyes: :eek: :D

[YMAN]

GeForce3

The Infinite Effects GPU


The NVIDIA GeForce3™ graphics processing unit (GPU) shakes up the gaming industry with unprecedented visual effects and sizzling frame rates—injecting life into the previously artificial world of computer-generated graphics.

Powered by the new NVIDIA nfiniteFX™ engine and the Lightspeed Memory Architecture™, the GeForce3 GPU enables users to look into a rich environment instead of just a computer screen. 3D scenes have ambiance with the GeForce3 because textures appear photo-realistic and custom lighting heightens the drama. Characters and living creatures have organic imperfections and unique expressions—you can see their personality. Programmability and performance combine to provide the catalyst for this graphics revolution.

Memory Interface: 128-bit DDR
Fill Rate: 3.2 Billion AA samples/s
Operations Per Second:800 Billion
Memory Bandwidth: 7.36 GB/s
Graphics Core: 256-bit

The nfiniteFX Engine
With the nfiniteFX engine's programmability, games and other graphics-intensive applications can offer more exciting and stylized visual effects. Vertex and Pixel Shaders are two patented architectural advancements that allow for a multitude of effects.
Lightspeed Memory Architecture
The Lightspeed Memory Architecture brings power to the GeForce3. That's why the NVIDIA GeForce3 is the platform of choice for the Microsoft® DirectX® 8 application program interface (API), and the technology foundation for the Microsoft next generation game console, Xbox™. High-resolution Antialiasing (HRAA) NVIDIA's patented high-resolution antialiasing (HRAA) generates high-performance samples at nearly four times the rate of GeForce2 Ultra, while delivering the industry's best visual quality.

Features & Benefits

nfiniteFX Engine
NVIDIA’s programmable Vertex and Pixel Shaders, collectively. The nfiniteFX engine gives developers the freedom to program a virtually infinite number of custom special effects, in order to create true-to-life characters and environments.
»more information


Vertex Shaders
Part of the nfiniteFX engine, Vertex Shaders are used to breathe life and personality into characters and environments. For example, through vertex shading developers can create true-to-life dimples or wrinkles that appear when a character smiles.
»more information


Pixel Shaders
Part of the nfiniteFX engine, Pixel Shaders alter lighting and surface effects that replace artificial, computerized looks with materials and surfaces that mimic reality.
»more information


Lightspeed Memory Architecture
NVIDIA memory bandwidth optimizations designed to make complex scenes faster. These optimizations make full-scene antialiasing (FSAA) practical for the first time, enabling users to enjoy high-resolution antialiasing (HRAA).
»more information


High-Resolution Antialiasing (HRAA)
Delivers fluid frame rates of 60 frames per second or more at high resolutions, such as 1024x768x32 or higher, with full-scene antialiasing (FSAA) turned on. Featuring the Quincunx AA mode, HRAA delivers a high level of detail and performance for all applications.
»more information


High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
Turns your PC into a fully functional DVD player, and an HDTV player with the purchase of an additional third-party decoder.
»more information


Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
Guarantees forward and backward compatibility with software drivers. Simplifies upgrading to a new NVIDIA product because all NVIDIA products work with the same driver software.
»more information



Microsoft® DirectX® 8.0 Compatibility
Ensures compatibility with the next generation of 3D applications to hit the market. The GeForce3 GPU supports DirectX 8.0 features and special effects for the ultimate 3D experience.


World's Fastest DDR Memory Interface
7.36GB per second memory subsystem ensures peak performance and the smoothest frame rates ever.


AGP 4X/2X and AGP Texturing Support
Takes advantage of new methods of transferring information more efficiently, and allows content developers to use high-quality, 32-bit color textures and high-polygon-count scenes.


Microsoft® DirectX® and OpenGL® Performance Optimizations and Support
Assures the best performance and guarantees compatibility with the broadest possible range of applications from high-end professional applications to consumer applications and games. A key element of the Develop and Deploy advantage offered by NVIDIA Quadro2 products.


TV-Out and Video Modules
Gives end users the option of big-screen gaming, digital timeshifting VCR, and video-editing applications.

nfiniteFX Engine

Raising the Bar for Realism in Graphics

With the GeForce3 and its nfiniteFX™ engine, NVIDIA introduces the world's first programmable 3D graphics chip architecture. By combining programmable vertex and pixel shading capabilities, the nfiniteFX engine delivers unprecedented visual realism on your PC. Textures appear photorealistic; characters and living creatures have organic imperfections and unique expressions—personalities are visible.

The nfiniteFX engine gives game and multimedia application developers the freedom to create a virtually infinite number of special effects and custom looks, providing gamers and multimedia enthusiasts with the most visually exciting experiences available on a PC. The addition of programmable Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders to consumer graphics processors shakes up the PC graphics market—visual quality takes a quantum leap forward

Lightspeed Memory Architecture

A New Level of Performance and Image Quality

Creating a real-time realistic 3D environment on a mainstream PC is the driving ambition of thousands of hardware and software developers employed in the computer graphics industry. While developments over the past years have made incredible strides towards improving the quality of real-time 3D graphics, one of the fundamental challenges in delivering interactive 3D content remains: increasing performance given limited increases in memory. Memory and graphics bus bandwidth remain as critical factors in determining graphics performance and quality. GeForce3 incorporates a number of revolutionary advances in graphics architecture that dramatically improve the GPU's efficiency with memory and bus bandwidth delivering a new level of performance and image quality.

The Memory Bandwidth Problem
In order to describe scenes with richness and enough detail to create a compelling environment, content developers have been increasing the geometric detail in their scenes at an incredible rate. With the introduction of the GeForce 256 graphics processing unit, much of the computational load for this function was moved from the CPU to the GPU. This shifting of the computational load to the GPU was a key factor in allowing content developers the freedom to move from hundreds of polygons per frame to hundreds of thousands. These rich scenes, while orders of magnitude more visually compelling, are also incredibly bandwidth intensive.

Lightspeed Memory Architecture: The Solution
GeForce3, through its advanced Lightspeed Memory Architecture™ brings an array of technology to bear on the challenge of memory bandwidth. By representing complex geometry as a high-order surface and performing those surface calculations entirely on the GPU, GeForce3 is able to avoid transmitting tremendous amounts of triangle data across the AGP bus, ensuring that communication between the host and the GPU can continue in an efficient and high performance manner. By attacking the
pixel bandwidth problems in a variety of ways, GeForce3 brings a tremendous leap in memory bandwidth efficiency to PC graphics. The combination of the most efficient and sophisticated crossbar-based memory controller ever built for PC graphics, with advanced technology to reduce bandwidth consumption, means that GeForce3 makes twice the use of memory bandwidth than any previous traditional architecture.

These advances pave the way for an increasingly dynamic and visually rich real-time 3D graphics experience. By improving the efficiency of communication between the host and graphics, content developers can continue to increase the geometric richness and visual complexity of their scenes to new levels, unbound by the limits of the AGP bus. Rendering at high resolutions, with high frame rates becomes the standard with GeForce3, as its advances in pixel rendering and memory efficiency mean that frame buffer bandwidth boundaries have been broken, paving the way for high resolution, 32-bit rendering without substantial performance penalties.

High-Resolution Antialiasing (HRAA)

Antialiasing through Multisampling

NVIDIA's GeForce3 graphics processing unit (GPU) introduces radical new technology designed to provide the industry's first solution for high-resolution antialiasing (HRAA). While other antialiasing solutions and their methods have been offered before, only GeForce3 can offer the unique combination of high resolutions and high frame rates in combination with high-quality antialiasing. By implementing hardware support for multisampling, as well as innovating new sampling technology, GeForce3 makes HRAA available for all real-time content.

Combatting the Aliasing Effect
One of the key image quality problems that has plagued PC users is aliasing, or the "jaggies". Aliasing is the stair-step effect on the edges of objects and can be extremely distracting for the PC user. The only way to combat aliasing is to create the effect of having more pixels on the screen. Historically, increasing the resolution was the best solution to this problem. The size of the "jaggy" or stair-step artifact is never larger than the size of the actual pixel. Hence, reducing the size of the pixel reduces the size of these artifacts. Changing the resolution is not always feasible, however. The user may already be using the maximum resolution
supported by the monitor or the application itself may limit the resolution. Beyond these hard limits the only solution is to increase the effective resolution. The best way to do this is to use more sophisticated techniques for computing the color of each pixel of the display in a way that simulates having more pixels. These techniques are referred to as "antialiasing."

"Supersampling" is an antialiasing technique that is simply a brute-force approach and is used in NVIDIA's GeForce2 GPUs and other modern graphics processors. A graphics processor that uses supersampling renders the screen image at a much higher resolution than the current display mode, and then scales and filters the image to the final resolution before it is sent to the display. A variety of methods exist for performing this operation, but each requires the graphics processor to render as many additional pixels as required by the supersampling method. Additionally, because the graphics processor is rendering more actual pixels than will be displayed, it must scale and filter those pixels down to the resolution for final display. This scaling and filtering can further reduce performance.

Multisampling: The Solution
The biggest problem with supersampling is performance. Users don't want to see their frame rate fall to one-half or one-fourth of what it should be. Multisampling is a more sophisticated technique than supersampling that involves higher quality output than standard rendering with much higher performance—a win/win scenario compared to either alternative. Multisampling requires a more sophisticated GPU, however, so only the newest GPUs available support this technique. The basic idea behind multisampling is to embed the intelligence behind antialiasing inside the core of the
GPU, in hardware. This makes the GPU more complex, but rewards the user with higher quality and higher performance. Multisampling works because the GPU itself is "aware" that multiple samples will be used to calculate the final pixel color."

You can think of these extra samples as extra "virtual pixels. The GeForce3 GPU has wider data paths internally so it can handle these extra virtual pixels without slowing down its standard rendering speed. In fact, the GeForce3 GPU can compute these "virtual pixels" or additional samples at full speed, with no reduction in engine performance whatsoever. These wider data paths enable GeForce3 to use the same texture data for all of the samples in the pixel and significantly reduce the memory bandwidth required to texture all of the AA samples.

The GeForce3 GPU is the first product ever to deliver HRAA at a consumer price point. The hardware multisampling capabilities of the GeForce3 GPU offer an unprecedented level of performance and flexibility, giving end users more and better mode choices for antialiasing, and helping them tap the full potential of this groundbreaking graphics processor.

[Pinky]

Originally posted by YMAN
GeForce3

The Infinite Effects GPU


The NVIDIA GeForce3™ graphics processing unit (GPU) shakes up the gaming industry with unprecedented visual effects and sizzling frame rates—injecting life into the previously artificial world of computer-generated graphics...

Now that was a good, thorough post!!

Not to mention made my tummy hurt paging through it.

To answer your question -- YES! Great card, but unless you have the spare cash, you're better off waiting for the price to go down.

[Cu]

Very nice cut and paste job. If you want to get high fps go G2 ULTRA. I lost 50fps in Q3 going from the G2 to the G3. I'm not impressed one bit with the G3. The thing that shocked me the most was the core clock going down to 200mhz. My G2 the core clock is at 250mhz. My G2 blows my G3 away fps and graphics wise. Just a ploy by Nvidia to suck more money out of people to later release the same damn vid card with the core clock stepped up.

[FerrariF50]

heheh I think I will stick with that Msi GTS2 Nividia for now :)



Originally posted by Pinky


Now that was a good, thorough post!!

Not to mention made my tummy hurt paging through it.

To answer your question -- YES! Great card, but unless you have the spare cash, you're better off waiting for the price to go down.

[FerrariF50]

I do agree with you here about the Geforce3...... Most people that i talked to were so brainwashed when I told them it's only like 5-10% faster then the Geforce2Pro but Nivida charges it like it's a whole new model line......

Originally posted by Cu
Very nice cut and paste job. If you want to get high fps go G2 ULTRA. I lost 50fps in Q3 going from the G2 to the G3. I'm not impressed one bit with the G3. The thing that shocked me the most was the core clock going down to 200mhz. My G2 the core clock is at 250mhz. My G2 blows my G3 away fps and graphics wise. Just a ploy by Nvidia to suck more money out of people to later release the same damn vid card with the core clock stepped up.

[Valid]

If you wanted to know 3DMark scores, I was getting 9000 easily in 2000, and 5500 easily in 2001. That's without any real overclocking at all, so it could probably be easily outdone. I don't know about everyone else, but it's my sincere belief that the true potential of the GeForce3 is, and may never be known. Fully programmable GPU's don't mean a thing when the technology cycles in 6 months. No one can take the time to learn something that will cycle out of date that quickly. I kind of regret getting it, but not that much. I built a brand new system, so I didn't already have a good card in place. I actually had a Diamond Monster II. Heh!

[Placid]

My scores are right on par with Valid's.
Visiontek not overclocked.
Q3 timedemo 640x480 16 bit=225fps.

Athlon at 1.5ghz.

[AtomicGuY]

The reason you lost FPS in Quake3 with the GeForce3 is simply because its 800MPixels for fill rate. Where as the GeForce2 Ultra has an impressive 1GPixel fill rate.

[FerrariF50]

:eek::eek::eek: A Geforce2 Ultra can beat a Geforce3?!?!?!!? hahah that sound crazy..



Originally posted by AtomicGuY
The reason you lost FPS in Quake3 with the GeForce3 is simply because its 800MPixels for fill rate. Where as the GeForce2 Ultra has an impressive 1GPixel fill rate.

[Pinky]

Yes, in lower resolutions the geforce 3 loses to the ultra, but at 32 bit 1600x#### the geforce 3 outperforms the ultra... some of the power will be seen soon with games that will use the new texture/shading features of the geforce 3.

For now, the fact it competes at all with the 50mhz higher core Ultra is a bonus, as this is not intended to be the best the geforce 3 will have to offer (the geforce 3 ultra is soon to come out, that should allow it to flex more muscle). The current geforce 3 card was not intended to be the best performance card/model... I need to stress that. It performs as well as it does only because of its sheer power, not because it was made to perform at a specific rate to compete with prior geforce cards.

[FerrariF50]

lol so the Geforce 3 is outdated in some area??? the hell if I'm going to pay $399 or whatever for that card........


Originally posted by Pinky
Yes, in lower resolutions the geforce 3 loses to the ultra, but at 32 bit 1600x#### the geforce 3 outperforms the ultra... some of the power will be seen soon with games that will use the new texture/shading features of the geforce 3.

For now, the fact it competes at all with the 50mhz higher core Ultra is a bonus, as this is not intended to be the best the geforce 3 will have to offer (the geforce 3 ultra is soon to come out, that should allow it to flex more muscle). The current geforce 3 card was not intended to be the best performance card/model... I need to stress that. It performs as well as it does only because of its sheer power, not because it was made to perform at a specific rate to compete with prior geforce cards.

[Pinky]

Originally posted by FerrariF50
lol so the Geforce 3 is outdated in some area??? the hell if I'm going to pay $399 or whatever for that card........

Read my last post very carefully... the differences is in features not in speed (Ultra may run UT at 80 FPS, while the Geforce 3 will do the same settings at 75FPS (but have the fullest AA and bitrate technology for optimal performance, not to mention texture/lighting enhancements the Ultra lacks)).

Soon you will be able to see what I mean once games are introduced. Demos are pretty impressive already. There's a thread for the Geforce3 Macworld unveiling that has some real-time animation with the new Doom 3 game (due to be released in about a year from what I've heard). Check that out, then you'll have a better idea what I'm talking about... but you're right, now it's too much money... I'll be the first to admit I bought it partly for coolness factor, but also so I wouldn't have to upgrade this one thing for another 6-12 months (rare to be able to do that nowadays with things changing so much).

[FerrariF50]

Well i find that buying a new video card every 6-12 months is just out of the question for me....Thats too much upgradeing... As you said that the geforce2 GTs is better then the Geforce2 Mx 400 I decided to go with that the Geforce2 Gts.... This will be cool if my mom lets me get it all....