cats out of the bag, Geforce3 information, features

[rickn]

Hardware Daily has some dish on Geforce3. Looks like snapshots from nVidia's confidential papers.



HW Daily

Specs.Features

 

[Ausm]

Looks Saaahweet...but i think I will wait until the Geforce 4 comes out then the price for the Geforce 3 will be reasonable

Ausm

 

[JayPatel]

EMBM??????? I thought they were never going to support that because it was inferior to their versions of ennvironent mapping?

 

[bernse]

Does that "unified" driver architicture mean it will be GLide compatible?

 

[SSP]

Sweet! Now how bout that 2d?

 

[Noriaki]

<< EMBM??????? I thought they were never going to support that because it was inferior to their versions of ennvironent mapping? >>

They have to, it's in DirectX 8.



<< Does that &quot;unified&quot; driver architicture mean it will be GLide compatible? >>

No (it still might be though, unified has nothing to do with it), the unified means that all the nVidia cores (from TNT1 and up) use the same driver set. They design their cores and drivers in such a way that any driver update can be used on any graphics card they made.

It's one of the main reasons I like nVidia over ATi, with ATi you have no idea when the driver support will end. With nVidia it ends when the company does, even for a TNT1.

That looks sweet...I'm getting a V5-5500 for cheap, that should hold me over for a year until this thing has a reasonable price :|

 

[Rand]

EMBM, last interview I read with NVidia they said that the GeForce 3 was NOT going to support EMBM at all.... and that was only a week or so ago, I wonder which is correct?

 

[Sunner]

What Noriaki said sounds reasonable.

Leaving out EMBM and therefore not having a DX8 compliant part would seem sorta stupid, if that one feature is the only one missing.

 

[Cirruslvr]

Are we going to see full reviews of GF3 at midnight EST or will they be later this week?

Found my answer here

 

[Biggs]

Can EMBM be enable through driver updates? What I mean is that can it work for a GF2-based card via a driver update or is it exclusive done in hardware?

 

[Dark4ng3l]

im sure it could be done in software(embm) but at ~10 fps

 

[JohnGalt]

is it gone now? I can't access it.

 

[Noriaki]

<< Can EMBM be enable through driver updates? What I mean is that can it work for a GF2-based card via a driver update or is it exclusive done in hardware? >>

Anything can be done in software (drivers) but I understand that EMBM is a rather heavy process so having hardware that does it is far preferable becuase it would give a heavy performance hit.

 

[Biggs]

Do Matrox cards do EMBM through hardware?

 

[rickn]

g400 does it in hardware, but it still takes a perf hit because it has to do it in 1.5 passes. Radeon and Geforce3 should take very little if any perf hit since they can apply more textures per pass

 

[zippy]

JohnGalt, it's still there for me. Not to mention, i saved those three pages locally...

 

[sd]

Video card companys will be puttin a sh!tty RAMDAC on these GeForce3s to keep the cost down = crappy 2d

 

[MikeyP]

Actually, the RAMDAC is integrated into the NV20 core, the companies cannot alter it. The image quality problems come from poor RFI filters I believe.