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nVidia's NV30: twice as fast as Geforce 4!! – Briant

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
(the site is slow and in Korean, but the important pictures are in English)

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Mack

Administrator

Posts: 2779
From:
Registered: 01-20-2001
Cool, thanks for the heads up!

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It's not seeing is believing, it's believing and then seeing.
http://www.twoguyssoftware.com

BlazeQ

Member

Posts: 260
From: USA
Registered: 05-11-2002
My GeForce 3 got old fast...

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I'm out of my mind... and into the mind of Christ -G.S. Megaphone

Briant

Member

Posts: 742
From: Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada
Registered: 01-20-2001
quote:
Originally posted by BlazeQ:
My GeForce 3 got old fast...


GeForce 3? Must be nice. I'd love to upgrade to one.

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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.

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I'm out of my mind... and into the mind of Christ -G.S. Megaphone

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

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I'm out of my mind... and into the mind of Christ -G.S. Megaphone

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

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Rowan / GODCENTRIC Christian Demoscene

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

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Rowan / GODCENTRIC Christian Demoscene