Briant Member Posts: 742 From: Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada Registered: 01-20-2001 |
"DAVID KIRK, Nvidia's chief technical officer, unveiled details of the NV30 - to be launched at Comdex later this month - to a thrilled audience in Korea some 48 hours or so ago. Nvidia claimed its NV30 chip will be twice as fast as the Geforce 4. It confirms it will have 125 million transistors, and the chip will be able to render 100 dinosaurs from Jurassic Park at 100 frames per second. The focus of chip marketing for this product is surely going to be as a cinematic shading GPU, as Nvidia will use full floating point or 128 bits per pixels. Company documents show that the engineers will focus on FSAA in this chip and this is the only way it can double the Ti4600 Geforce 4 by a factor of two. The new effects will make all demonstrations excel, and Nvidia is sure to strike a better deal with Microsoft as they kiss and make up and as DirectX 9 is launched. If Geforce 4 performance is doubled, we'll be looking at more than 22000 3D Marks - and this would truly be astonishing." http://www.technoa.co.kr/notes/content.asp?content_id=14249 |
Mack Administrator Posts: 2779 From: Registered: 01-20-2001 |
Cool, thanks for the heads up! ------------------ |
BlazeQ Member Posts: 260 From: USA Registered: 05-11-2002 |
My GeForce 3 got old fast... ------------------ |
Briant Member Posts: 742 From: Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada Registered: 01-20-2001 |
quote: GeForce 3? Must be nice. I'd love to upgrade to one. |
BlazeQ Member Posts: 260 From: USA Registered: 05-11-2002 |
Yeah, it is nice. Bought it about a year ago and it has helped out a lot with my 3d work. Once I scrape up enough money I'm going for a tablet. One of those monitor/tablets would be awesome, but they are way out of my price range. ------------------ |
BlazeQ Member Posts: 260 From: USA Registered: 05-11-2002 |
Did a quick search on eBay. Looks like a lot of cards are going for under $100. Click here ------------------ |
GUMP Member Posts: 1335 From: Melbourne, FL USA Registered: 11-09-2002 |
I would recommend buying an ATI Radeon 9500Pro/9700/9700Pro as the NV30 isn't going to be available until January at the earliest. Both the R300 based cards and the NV30 will exceed the Microsoft VS/PS2.0 specifications. The NV30 may exceed the maximum instruction length of the R300 but such long shader programs wouldn't be usable for real time rendering and would stall the pipeline. From the available information it is questionable whether the NV30 will be able to use MRT or Displacement Mapping. The DX9 level functionaly is slowly being exposed in the ATI drivers and if you're not part of the ATI developer relations program then the recently leaked 6200 XP drivers allow the use of ARB_frament_shader in OpenGL. |
rowanseymour Member Posts: 284 From: Belfast, Northern Ireland Registered: 02-10-2001 |
I myself am going to be resisting the temptation to upgrade my GF3 - nothing encourages me write inefficient, unoptimized code quite like having a state of the art gfx card ------------------ |
GUMP Member Posts: 1335 From: Melbourne, FL USA Registered: 11-09-2002 |
Then again, nothing blocks you from being able to support new features like NOT owning the new cards... |
rowanseymour Member Posts: 284 From: Belfast, Northern Ireland Registered: 02-10-2001 |
I'm still trying to get a hang of the old features ------------------ |