Specifications

The Specs

120MHz/166MHz core/memory clock
Integrated geometry transform engine
Integrated dynamic lighting engine
Four-pixel rendering pipeline
480 million pixels per second fill rate
15 million triangles per second peak throughput
Cube-environment mapping
Single-pass emboss and dot-product bump mapping
DX6 Texture Compression
350MHz RAMDAC
2D resolution of 2048x1536 at 75Hz
AGP4X with Fast Writes
32MB SDRAM
OpenGL ICD for Windows98, NT4, 2000
DX7 Support
S-video output
Powerful HDTV motion compensation.
Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution.

You already know this don't you?

Just in case you spent the last month in a cave or under the third couch cushion looking for that runaway Twinkie, we'll cover the GeForce basics on this page. If you've already read our other GeForce articles you can skip to the next page.

The GeForce 256 has a 120MHz core clock, and a 166MHz memory clock. The quad-pixel rendering pipeline can push out 480Mpixels/s (120MHz x 4pixels/clock) or 480Mtexels/s. Current video cards have fill rates around 300-366Mtexels/s. The Prophet is a vanilla GeForce 256 card which means that it has normal SDRAM instead of the DDR(Double Data Rate) SGRAM found on the GeForce 256 DDR cards. The DDR cards have double the memory bandwidth of the normal SDRAM cards and offer faster frame rates at high resolutions. You can read a little more about memory bandwidth issues here.

Transformation and Lighting

In addition to the increased fill rate, the GeForce 256 is also the first consumer level 3D accelerator to feature onboard transformation and lighting. The T&L engine allows the video card to push out 4-5 times the number of triangles current CPUs can handle. Offloading T&L duties to the video card, allows the CPU to spend more time on running the game, calculating physics and perform AI duties. Game developers will also be able to create high detailed settings with You can read more about T&L here and here.

Another new feature is cube environment mapping, which is a new technique for creating accurate real-time reflections. You can read more about cube environment mapping here.

As we mentioned before, we've already covered all the GeForce 256 features in the past articles. You can find all our GeForce coverage in the "Video Cards" section of our hardware index.