GeForceFX: NVIDIA goes Hollywood?

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GeForceFX - NVIDIA Goes Hollywood?

At Comdex Fall 2002, NVIDIA will unveil the heir to the highly successful GeForce4 Ti line of graphics chips, which was in turn presented to the public in complete detail in February of this year. Now NVIDIA seems to be copying its main competitor ATi's modus operandi, presenting its new chip, dubbed GeForceFX and code-named NV30, in stages. At Comdex, NVIDIA will only be revealing details on the chip's technologies and features, which far surpass the DirectX 9 specification. There will not, however, be any concrete information on performance or the card versions that will be produced - not to mention testing samples.

This makes it nigh on impossible to answer the big question everybody is asking and has been pondering for months now. Will the role of technology and performance leader revert from ATi, who captured it several months ago with its Radeon 9700 PRO, back to NVIDIA and its GeForceFX? I'd like to save that question and its answer for the end of this article, and cover the GeForceFX's new features and capabilities first.

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Header Cell - Column 0	NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600	NVIDIA GeForceFX	ATI Radeon 9700 PRO
Chip Technology	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit
Process	0.15 Micron	0.13 Micron	0.15 Micron
Transistors	63 Mio	125 Mio	~107 Mio
Memory Bus	128 bit DDR	128 bit DDR2	256 bit DDR
Memory Bandwidth	10.4 GB/s	16 GB/s	19.8 GB/s
Pixel Fillrate	1.24 Gigapixel/s	~4 Gigapixel/s	2.6 Gigapixel/s
Anti Aliased Fillrate	4.8 Billion AA Samples/s	~16 Billion AA Samples/s	15.6 Billion AA Samples/s
Max FSAA Mode	4x	8x	6x
Triangle Transform Rate	69 M Triangles/s	350 M Triangles/s	325 M Triangles/s
AGP Bus	1x/2x/4x	1x/2x/4x/8x	1x/2x/4x/8x
Memory	128 MB	128/256 MB	128/256 MB
GPU Clock	300 MHz	~500 MHz	325 MHz
Memory Clock	325 MHz (650 DDR)	500 MHz (1000 DDR2)	310 MHz (620 DDR)
Memory	BGA 2.8ns	BGA 2.0ns	BGA 2.9 ns
Vertex Shader	2	FP Array	4
Pixel Pipelines	4	8	8
Texture Units Per Pipe	2	1	1
Textures per Texture Unit	4	16	8
Vertex S. Version	1.1	2.0+	2
Pixel S. Version	1.3	2.0+	2
DirectX Generation	8	9.0 (+)	9
FSAA Modi	MultiSampling	MultiSampling	MultiSampling
Memory Optmizations	LMA II	LMA II OptimizedColor Compression	Hyper Z III
Display Outputs	2	2	2
Chip Internal Ramdacs	2 x 400 MHz	2 x 400 MHz	2 x 400 MHz
Chip External Ramdacs	-	-	-
Bits per Color Channel	8	10	10
Special	-	TV Encoder On-ChipExtended ProgammabilityAdaptive Filtering	TV Encoder On-Chip; FullStreamAdaptive Filtering
Estimated Price	~ $200-300	Not specified	$399

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