Introduction

The evolutionary progression of GeForce

Every few years 3D graphics technology takes a major step forward. In 1999, NVIDIA debuted their original GeForce graphics processing unit, introducing an onboard transform and lighting engine to the consumer graphics segment. While the number of applications that took advantage of T&L was limited at the time, practically every modern graphics card now sports hardware T&L; the technology has truly become mainstream. A year ago 3D graphics took another major step forward with the release of DirectX 8.0 and its support of pixel and vertex shaders. While previous graphics accelerator releases emphasized performance, NVIDIA's DirectX 8.0 GPU, GeForce3, focused on creating lifelike, immersive environments.

In the end, the GeForce3 was certainly impressive; its Lightspeed Memory Architecture offered up to 7.36GB/sec of memory bandwidth, offering unprecedented performance (at the time) at high resolutions, and its new Quincunx antialiasing algorithm brought 4x AA visual quality without the severe performance hit. However, its $500 price tag was a bit too high for most consumers to stomach and the number of games that supported its pixel and vertex shaders was extremely limited. As a result, the GeForce3 was relegated to the high-end market; the majority of consumers picked up a card in the GeForce2 family, or didn't purchase anything at all in the hopes that prices would ultimately fall. Those prayers were answered last fall when NVIDIA unveiled its Titanium family of GeForce2 and GeForce3 products, and didn't cost a small fortune to purchase. But what does NVIDIA do for an encore? Release another product of course!

Introducing Code Creatures

Remind you of the nature demo?

GeForce Times Four

Lets get a few things straight first. While GeForce4 was internally codenamed NV25, this is not a true "next-generation" product in the truest sense of the word. Remember the original GeForce launch? Just as GeForce was a groundbreaking design and GeForce2 was a faster version of the underlying technology, GeForce4 is a faster iteration of GeForce3.

While this may be disappointing to some, the performance advantage GeForce4 boasts over its predecessor can arguably be considered revolutionary rather than evolutionary, especially when looking at GeForce4's performance at high resolutions with antialiasing enabled. (But we'll take a look at that a little further in this article.) Essentially with GeForce4, NVIDIA has taken a good product (GeForce3) and optimized it for even more performance. If that isn't enough for you, NVIDIA has also cranked up the core and memory clock speeds for additional performance gains. And to top it off, end users get dual display capability built-in (via NVIDIA's nView technology) and a new antialiasing mode.

GeForce4 Ti board

What big mean teeth the wolfman has