nFinite FX II

Furry wolfman

Look 'ma - no skin!

Dual Vertex Shaders

If you recall the GeForce3 launch, NVIDIA's nFinite FX engine refers to the pixel and vertex shaders present in the GPU. The vertex shader can be used to produce lifelike skin - NVIDIA's Zoltar demo also used the vertex shader present in GeForce3 to create realistic facial animations. Before DirectX 8 accelerators like the GeForce3 arrived on the scene, these complex calculations had to be performed by the CPU. With polygon counts in the latest games constantly increasing, it doesn't take long before the CPU becomes overburdened with work, resulting in poor performance.

With GeForce4, NVIDIA has added a second vertex shader to the nFinite FX engine. As a result, NVIDIA claims its dual vertex shaders are capable of rendering up to 136 million vertices per second: that's more than three times the muscle of GeForce3!

Hairy again

Gentlemen, meet Grace!

The power of GeForce4's dual vertex shaders is highlighted in NVIDIA's Wolfman demo. Our angry wolfman consists of eight concentric fur shells and contains over 100,000 polygons. In fact, to highlight the power of the nFinite FX II engine, we were given a demonstration of the wolfman demo on a 1.0GHz Pentium III system equipped with 256MB RAM. With the wolfman character fully lit and shaded, the system's performance never hitched. In fact, with lighting enabled we were able to see shadows on top of shadows all rendered in real-time with no hitching - clearly the Ti 4600 board was designed for the consumer with the latest and greatest, as well as the consumer that's behind in the CPU department.

Enhanced Pixel Shaders

With the wolfman's multiple levels of fur and hair, the nFinite FX II engines' pixel shaders have been enhanced to improve performance when working with three and four textures. One interesting side effect of the wolfman's hair and fur is that it reflects more light in some directions than in others, this is known as anisotropic lighting. NVIDIA claims that its enhanced pixel shaders offer a 50% performance improvement over GeForce3, making features such as anisotropic lighting possible with smooth frame rates.

Grace likes to dance

NVIDIA's pond demo