GeForceFX: NVIDIA goes Hollywood?

GeForceFX - NVIDIA Goes Hollywood?

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 Ti4600NVIDIA GeForceFXATI Radeon 9700 PRO
Chip Technology256 bit256 bit256 bit
Process0.15 Micron0.13 Micron0.15 Micron
Transistors63 Mio125 Mio~107 Mio
Memory Bus128 bit DDR128 bit DDR2256 bit DDR
Memory Bandwidth10.4 GB/s16 GB/s19.8 GB/s
Pixel Fillrate1.24 Gigapixel/s~4 Gigapixel/s2.6 Gigapixel/s
Anti Aliased Fillrate4.8 Billion AA Samples/s~16 Billion AA Samples/s15.6 Billion AA Samples/s
Max FSAA Mode4x8x6x
Triangle Transform Rate69 M Triangles/s350 M Triangles/s325 M Triangles/s
AGP Bus1x/2x/4x1x/2x/4x/8x1x/2x/4x/8x
Memory128 MB128/256 MB128/256 MB
GPU Clock300 MHz~500 MHz325 MHz
Memory Clock325 MHz (650 DDR)500 MHz (1000 DDR2)310 MHz (620 DDR)
MemoryBGA 2.8nsBGA 2.0nsBGA 2.9 ns
Vertex Shader2FP Array4
Pixel Pipelines488
Texture Units Per Pipe211
Textures per Texture Unit4168
Vertex S. Version1.12.0+2
Pixel S. Version1.32.0+2
DirectX Generation89.0 (+)9
FSAA ModiMultiSamplingMultiSamplingMultiSampling
Memory OptmizationsLMA IILMA II OptimizedColor CompressionHyper Z III
Display Outputs222
Chip Internal Ramdacs2 x 400 MHz2 x 400 MHz2 x 400 MHz
Chip External Ramdacs---
Bits per Color Channel81010
Special-TV Encoder On-ChipExtended ProgammabilityAdaptive FilteringTV Encoder On-Chip; FullStreamAdaptive Filtering
Estimated Price~ $200-300Not specified$399