Specifications

Features

nfiniteFX engine
Lightspeed Memory Architecture
Surface engine for high-order surfaces and patches
Programmable Vertex Shader

• Procedural deformations


• Programmable matrix palette skinning


• Keyframe animation interpolation


• Morphing


• Fog effects


• Radial


• Elevation


• Non-linear

Programmable Pixel Shader

• Phong-style lighting for per-pixel accuracy


• Dot3 bump mapping


• Environmental bump mapping (EMBM)


• Procedural textures


• Per-pixel reflections

HRAA-high-resolution antialiasing

• Featuring Quincunx AA mode

Integrated hardware transform engine
Integrated hardware lighting engine
DirectX and S3TC texture compression
Dual cube environment mapping capability

• Reflection maps


• Accurate, real-time environment reflections

Hardware accelerated real-time shadows
True, reflective bump mapping

• Z-correct bump mapping


• Phong-style lighting effects on bump maps with reflections

High-performance 2D rendering engine

• Optimized for 32-, 24-, 16-, 15- and 8-bpp modes


• True-color hardware cursor with alpha


• Multi-buffering (double, triple or quad) for smooth animation and video playback

High-quality HDTV/DVD playback

• High-definition video processor (HDVP) for full-screen, full-frame video playback of HDTV and
• DVD content


• Independent hardware color controls for video overlay


• Hardware color-space conversion (YUV 4:2:2 and 4:2:0)


• Motion compensation


• 5-tap horizontal by 3-tap vertical filtering


• 8:1 up/down scaling


• Per-pixel color keying


• Multiple video windows supported for CSC and filtering


• DVD sub-picture alpha-blended compositing

Operating systems

• Windows 95/98/NT/2000


• Linux


• Mac OS

API support

• OpenGL 1.2 and lower


• DirectX 8.0 Version 1.1 and lower

Performance

57 million transistors
0.15 micron manufacturing process
200MHz core clock
4 pixel pipelines, 2 textures per pixel
3.2 billion AA samples per second fill rate
7.36GB/sec memory bandwidth

Compatibility

NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture
Fully-compliant professional OpenGL 1.2 support for all Linux and Windows operating systems
WHQL-certified for Windows 98/NT/2000
Linux
Mac OS

Ballistics

More Ballistics

Notes

The GeForce3 may have the same number of pixel pipelines as the GeForce2 GTS, but it has more than twice as many transistors. While the raw fill rate hasn't changed much, the huge jump in complexity is telling of how much has gone into the GeForce3's new features. That said, NVIDIA has chosen to move away from listing pixel fill rates as a performance unit.

According to NVIDIA, "simplistic fill rate (clock speed multiplied by number of pixel pipelines) has been used as a metric for graphics performance in the past, but doesn't apply to GeForce3 because the visibility subsystem renders only visible pixels. This creates a 'fill rate multiplier' effect that is roughly equal to the depth complexity of the rendered frame. For this reason, it is variable and dependent on the application and the content of the scene."

Silicon Dreams Soccer

Per-pixel lit socks!

In other words, new occlusion culling (commonly mis-termed HSR, hidden surface removal) techniques increase efficiency. It's not how much fill rate you have, it's how much of it you stop wasting.

Also, just in case you were wondering, hardware cursor support allows you to have the cursor overlay whatever else is on the screen. If, for example, you're running Quake 3 at 1600x1200 with 4x AA, the cursor on the main menu screen won't stutter as you move it.

Unreal tech demo

Show me the triangles!