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In the Forums... |
Posted: June 16, 2000 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen GTS: GigaTexel Shader (Cont.) Using per-pixel shading, effects and calculations are applied to individual pixels. Since the triangle will be composed of many pixels, the resulting image is highly accurate in representing what the image was intended to be. Let's assume that a generic triangle is drawn together (including its area) using 100 pixels. Now, we also have a effect pallet of 10 effects. Each pixel then, can accept any one of the ten that are available. That's an outcome of 10,000 different possible effects just for that one triangle. If interpolation was used, than the effect is fixed using that one out of ten effects and generalized across the entire triangle. Below is a visual comparison between interpolation and per-pixel shading.  Click for a larger image The action doesn't stop there. This entire section was assuming that one pixel was being manipulated in one pass. The GeForce 2 contains 4 pixel pipelines... enabling seven effects per pixel, per pipeline, per pass! These are the major features that NVIDIA has put into the GeForce 2 GTS chip. Want to know more in-depth information about it? Head over to our guide about the GeForce 2 GTS. Now, let’s move on to drivers. Drivers As we noted in our last GeForce 2 review, drivers are extremely important to a card’s performance. We’ll see how ASUS does with its drivers. Below we have a shot of the Information tab in the ASUS drivers which are based on NVIDIA’s 5.16 Detonators.  Here we see all the information we need about the card, from IRQ settings to DirectX version to RAM amount. For some reason Side Band is off, so can anyone email me and tell me how to turn it on? Thanks. Below we have a shot of Color tabs in the Display Control panel.  You’ll notice features not seen in other drivers. ASUS has included a color tab for every portion of the display -- Direct3D, Video, and OpenGL. This is really appreciated as it allows gamma, brightness and contrast settings in games without affecting your desktop settings. Very well implemented. |
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