Introduction

Stronger, better, faster?

Let's face it. The past few generations of video cards have been pretty docile. Yes, the ATI Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce chips are great, but they aren't… explosive. We haven't seen a card that has been able to drastically raise the quality of games since the days of the 3dfx Voodoo1 and Voodoo2.

Aside from increased fill rates, Hardware T&L and anti-aliasing are arguably the two biggest graphics features made available to consumers in the past two years. These features, impressive as they are, haven't inspired the jaw-dropping awe that turns gamers into drooling idiots (or even moreso than usual).

AquaNox

Volumetric fog

Where's the beef?

Anti-aliasing looks nice, but it comes with a significant fill rate and bandwidth cost. The higher the quality, the greater the cost. Speaking as a hardcore FPS player, we love anti-aliasing, but we love our frame rates more.

After more than a year, Hardware T&L still has limited support. The performance benefits of hardware T&L can't be denied, just take a look at a few Quake 3, MDK2, or 3DMark benchmarks, but we still aren't aware of any games so chock full of triangles that they actually require a hardware T&L enabled video card.

When properly used, the level of detail hardware T&L offers is jaw-dropping, but we can't count NVIDIA tech demos as actual game titles. The hardware T&L we currently have isn't enough to push developers onto the technology bandwagon.

Lots of polys

Look at the detail

GeForce3

If you look at NVIDIA's major chip releases (GeForce 256, GeForce2 GTS, GeForce2 Ultra), it would be tempting to predict that the GeForce3 would be yet another plodding, methodical step up in performance.

We are relieved to say that NVIDIA's GeForce3 is truly a dramatic step forward in the world of 3D gaming. The GeForce3 is the first graphics card to support DX8's vertex and pixel shaders in hardware, enabling lifelike real time effects. The GeForce3's real time effects are simply amazing. In addition, the GeForce3 features a new Lightspeed Memory Architecture, a collection of technologies designed to optimize memory bandwidth, and the chip also has a new, more efficient multisampling anti-aliasing method.

Wow	Pixel shaders, and quad texturing