Introduction

The evolutionary progression of GeForce

Every few years 3D graphics takes a major step forward. Typically these advances coincide with the release of a new API; in more recent years, it has been Microsoft’s DirectX API. In 1999, NVIDIA launched their original GeForce graphics processing unit, introducing an onboard transform and lighting engine (T&L) to the consumer graphics segment. While the technology was initially slow to take off, with only a handful of applications designed to take advantage of T&L, slowly but surely more games took advantage of this feature. The Quake 3 engine alone spawned dozens of such examples. Today hardware support for T&L is an afterthought.

In 2001 3D graphics took another major step forward with the release of DirectX 8.0 and its support of pixel and vertex shaders. Once again the technology got off to a sluggish start; none of the titles on the market took advantage of shaders, so NVIDIA’s first DX8 part, the GeForce 3 GPU, relied solely on its fixed function units while its programmable engine sat around basically untapped. In fact, if it weren’t for the GeForce 3’s new crossbar memory controller, the card would have offered little, if any incentive for enthusiasts to upgrade. This feature allowed the GeForce 3 to run games with 2xAA and even 4xAA with playable frame rates, something previous cards really couldn’t do.

Original GeForce 7800 GTX with copper cooling (note, final board uses aluminum)

Meet Luna

In all other situations with benchmarks of that time, the GeForce 3 performed roughly on par with GeForce 2 Ultra.

By the time GeForce4 arrived, DX8 applications were finally becoming more common, although with Quake 3, Serious Sam, and Unreal Tournament dominating the shelves, there were still only a handful of programmable titles on the market. With GeForce4, NVIDIA largely built on GeForce3, adding an additional vertex shader for pumping triangles, and making optimizations to the pixel shader and memory subsystem. NVIDIA spiced things up even further by cranking up the clock speeds, particularly on the GeForce4 Ti 4600. GeForce4 cards, particularly the Ti 4200 and Ti 4600 were incredibly popular; to this day, over three years since they were initially released, there are still quite a few of these cards in everyday use.

Luna has buddies

NVIDIA then stumbled with DirectX 9. Their competitor, ATI, beat them to market with RADEON 9700, and their initial DX9 part, GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, performed slower than the 9700 and ran loud and hot. Ultimately the product was scrapped before it really got off the ground, with NVIDIA introducing GeForce FX 5900 instead. The 5900 somewhat improved the situation for NVIDIA, but it still trailed ATI in performance with DX9 titles. We noted this in our GeForce FX and DirectX 9 Half-Life 2 Performance article, where the 5900 was consistently outgunned by less expensive mainstream DX9 ATI cards like the RADEON 9600 XT.

NVIDIA really got things right with GeForce 6 however. NVIDIA beat ATI to market, delivering shader model 3.0 hardware well before their Canadian competitor (which still hasn’t introduced a shader model 3.0 part, by the way), and in better quantities on the higher-end parts at retail. Also working in the GeForce 6’s favor was software support. Whereas DX8/DX8.1, and DX9 software trailed the hardware by over a year, applications that took advantage of shader model 3.0 were available within months of GeForce 6800’s launch, bucking the trend of software being slow to catch up to the hardware. Crytek even integrated GeForce 6’s OpenEXR high dynamic range lighting into Far Cry.

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Mike here likes to upgrade PCs

With dozens more shader model 3.0 titles set to be introduced between now and the end of this year, NVIDIA is now poised to introduce their second generation shader model 3.0 card, GeForce 7800 GTX, formerly codenamed G70. The new GPU boasts better performance and improved image quality over its predecessor. Let’s explore how NVIDIA accomplishes this…