Performance Gaps

What changes have we been seeing?

Without sounding too harsh, most of the new "next-generation" cards we're seeing today consist of higher speed parts using smaller manufacturing processes than previous generation devices. As most people know, Nvidia's TNT2 is essentially a .25 um version of the TNT, with a little fine-tuning in the rendering pipeline and support for more memory.

3dfx's Voodoo3 is in a similar position, essentially a Voodoo Banshee with an additional texture unit. Both of these architectures represent the top tier of performance in today's market, but neither have implemented any major architectural changes to their base design.

So who's been making waves lately?

Not everyone is opting to push out "interim products" while working on the next big thing. There are a number of manufacturers pushing out the features instead of or in addition to upping the performance bar, and many of these are solid demonstrations of innovative techniques and technologies that will hopefully be adopted by other video chipset manufacturers soon.

More textures, less space

S3 and 3DLabs have been actively pursuing new texture management schemes to reduce the amount of RAM required for highly detailed scenes. S3's S3 Texture Compression (S3TC) uses a proprietary (now a Microsoft Direct3D standard) format to compress and store large textures, achieving up to a 6:1 ratio over raw texture files.

Due to the more efficient file system of S3TC, games such as Unreal Tournament have been demonstrated to run significantly faster while using highly detailed compressed textures as opposed to the standard low-detail default textures, at least on Savage3D/Savage 4 hardware. The difference however, lies in the incredible amount of detail and color afforded by S3TC. Now, true-color, photo-realistic textures can be implemented in the space and speed of low-resolution default textures.