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Features up close
The Nfinite FX Engine I'm sure most of you people have heard a load of this crap, so we'll be looking at the benchmarks soon. However since we cannot totally ignore these features, we decided to be brief in our explanation. First it was the Emotion Engine of the Sony Play station and then the "Charisma Engine" of the ATI Radeon. Now we have the Nfinite FX Engine in the G Force 3. Though it does not sound as Romatic as the Graphics Engines of its competitors the NFinite FX Engine by far is the most advanced Graphics Engine ever made and is the defining factor in the performance of the G Force 3. At the heart of the G Force 3 are the programmable Pixel and Vertex Shaders which give Game Developers never before experienced flexibility in developing and incorporating realistic 3D Effects to games. Basically to understand what the NFinite Fx Engine brings to games you must first understand the concepts behind the Vertex Shader and the Pixel Shader. Vertex Shader A 3D image in a scene is brought to life through a complex formation of triangles which in turn makes the 3D object. A triangle is composed of three vertices. A Vertex is where two edges of the triangle meet. A Vertex shader basically adds effects to each vertex adding to the 3D effect of the scene. This procedure involves millions of mathematical calculations and thus is very complex, it needs very fast processors to be able to compute such scenes thus realism in this aspect was limited until the G Force 3 GPU Came along. It incorporates a fully programmable Vertex shader (Embedded in the NFinite FX Engine) with the massive power of the G Force 3 GPU and its 57 million transistors this allows for unprecedented flexibility for game developers who can now develop realistic 3D images, render them real time, and also add specific effect to each vertex using the Nfinite FX Engine. This allows for more complex scenes to rendered as well as to add never before scene affects to 3D scenes, and bring 3D a step closer to reality. You will see examples as you read ahead with our review
Pixel shader Now we come to the other aspect of the Nfinite Fx Engine the Pixel shader. I guess a pixel needs no introduction. It's basically the smallest element that makes up an image. Pixels determine the look of the image. NVIDIA introduced per pixel shading with the G Force 2 GPU, and the G Force 3 takes it to the next level. The G Force 3 has a programmable pixel shader which lets the game developed determine how a pixel should be shaded and not the GPU as in traditionally would by selecting the shading from a pre set palette. This sets the stage for images to achieve realism as never before.
The introduction Programmable pixel shader and the programmable vertex shader to game developers is like the invention of the wheel to human kind. Never before were they able to use their creative talent to such effect and implement it with such ease and flexibility. Games will never be the same after the GeForce 3.
The Light Speed Memory Architecture Realistic 3D scenes contain a lot of information that needs to be handled and rendered. Thus loads of information had to travel to and fro through the AGP bus form the 3D Accelorator and the CPU. The amount of information that could be carried at a time was limited due to bandwidth limitations. With the introduction of the GPU generation this problem was solved to a degree as most of the computation load of 3D rendering was moved away from the CPU and into the GPU. Thus the amount of information that needed to pass through the AGP bus was lessened paving the way for greater efficiency. The Advanced Light speed memory architecture incorporated in the GPU takes this to the next level. By representing complex geometrical scenes as a high order surface and rendering and computing the scene entirely on the GPU the G Force 3 Reduces the information transfers in the AGP bus solving the memory bandwidth problem. It also incorporates a cross bar based advanced memory controlled to solve the internal memory bandwidth problem. Also apart from the Light speed memory architecture the G Force 3 also has the words fastest DDR memory interface which can achieve a bandwidth of 7.36GB per second insuring that there are no bottle necks within the GPU.
HRAA (High Resolution Anti Aliasing) Anti aliasing is the solution for jaggies and rough edges that you see on 3D rendered image. These imperfections take the realism out of such images. The solution to the problem was mostly solved by increasing the resolution of the scene so that more pixels will be used when illustrating the scene thus doing away with jagged edges. But this is not always feasible, thus anti aliasing was introduced. Super sampling was the first approach to anti aliasing that 3D chip designers took to anti aliasing. This approach was used in the G Force 2 and contemporary graphics processors. Super sampling involved processing the scene at a much higher resolution and then filtering it back to the desired resolution. This was a brute force technique that needed a lot of computational power, processing time and thus the cost in the end was performance. As I mentioned before the G Force 3 unlike its predecessors does not rely on brute force techniques to get the work done, thus the solution to jaggies from the G Force 3 is a technique called Multisampling. Multi sampling is a more complex technique than super sampling. It involves taking multiple samples of a pixel before the GPU decides on the final pixel color and shading. These multiple sample pixels act as virtual pixels in the image. This is only possible by using a highly sophisticated graphics processor with wide data paths within its core to handle such loads of information. The G Force 3 is able to achieve High Resolution Anti Aliasing without compromising performance, due to it's wide data paths and high memory bandwidth.
HDVP The NVIDIA G Force 3 GPU also has support for high definition Television through it's high definition video processor. This will enable user of the G Force 3 to use their GPU for much more than just playing games, and to enjoy the pleasures of digital real time television.
The above mentioned are just a few of the various technical innovation featured in the G Force 3. We didn't want to bore you with all the technical details. All in all the G Force 3 represents a leap in the 3 D graphics industry equivalent to the leap it achieved when the Voodoo graphics processor was launched so long ago, in relation to new technology introduced. In Short Pc Games will never look the same again after the G Force 3. By incorporating the unified driver architecture, NVIDIA has also made the G Force 3 backwards compatible with all current and past games. It also features full support for DirectX 8.0, Open GL, Direct 3D and other video standards. But don't take my word for it, read on and you will find out what this baby can really do as Technoyard put to the test our newly received G Force 3 based product by Visiontek.
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