NVIDIA GeForce 256 Introduction

Written: Sept 7, 1999
Written by: Roday

NVIDIA did a brilliant demonstration of marketing on the web for the launch of their next-generation graphic processor, what used to be the NV10. The biggest feature was the in-your-face countdown to a "world changing" event they had on their home page. The internal project name itself, NV10 just after the NV4, demonstrates quite a leap in design.

The "Ge" in the name is for Geometry (with a capital "G") and the 256 represents the fact that the architecture is of a 256 bit design. The 256 bit architecture should be helpful for operating at resolutions above 800x600, though it seems that the external memory interface may still be 128 bits wide with the internal bus being 256 bits wide. This is an important issue when comparing the chip to the upcoming Savage 2000 part from S3.

The Savage 2000 has a much higher texturing capability than the GeForce but S3 have had trouble scaling to higher resolutions. In the geometry front things are more clear cut, it better be, because the transistor count rivals the newly released Athlon CPU and is double the Pentium IIIs. The only thing which can touch the GeForce in this area is the as yet vapour-ware Thor co-processor by the BitBoys. And this is the heart of the argument presented for the GeForce by NVIDIA.

The chip is really fast, "very, very fast" according to John Carmack, with current games and allows you to play Q3, albeit at less than optimum settings and performance, at 1600x1200. But the sweet-spot for gamers according to NVIDIA (and 3dfx) is 60 fps at 1024x768 with all features turned on. The real treat is in the "full features" part.

For NVIDIA, like T-Buffer for 3dfx, it is geometry, lighting, anisotropic texture mapping, cubic environment bump mapping and more. The new features brought in with this new generation of graphic chips can up visual quality almost as much as the first hardware accelerated 3D cards did from vanilla 2D cards.

Rik Heywood, lead programmer on Evolva at Computer Artworks put it this way,

"It is one of the first games to fully exploit the T&L hardware in the GeForce 256, and with in game characters using more polygons than we used to make the FMV, it looks awesome!"

Let's take a closer look at the individual features to be found in the GeForce 256 and what they could mean to you as a gamer. But before that the spec sheet.

Next Page: Hardware Transforms & Specs