Posted: November 18th, 2002
Written by: Justin "The Sheriff" Woods

Introduction & details

Introduction

If you own a computer, you've heard of Nvidia, and its famous line of GeForce graphics cards. When the GeForce line was launched, the era of full screen anti-aliased (FSAA) gaming began. It also introduced users to the dedicated GPU by incorporating a hardware transform and lighting engine into the graphics processing unit (GPU). The GeFore wasn't just an evolution to predecessors; it was a revolution. In the few short years since its release, we've seen many improvements to the GeForce GPU, but today, Nvidia is raising the bar again, and in a very big way. The release of the latest Geforce, now named GeForce FX, promises to change they way games are played, viewed, and developed. Nvidia is promising cinematic quality, rivaling Pixar's Toy Story, in games. Lets take a look at the next generation of GPU, the GeForce FX

Features

NVIDIA CineFX™ engine

1GHz DDR2 high speed memory

NVIDIA Intellisample™ FSAA up to 8x

Microsoft Direct X 9.0 Pixel Shader 2.0, and Vertex Shader 2.0 programming specifications

Unified drivers

Fully AGP 8x

0.13-micron fabrication process

Full 128-bit studio precision pixel processing

Unified Cg development kit

Loss-less color compression

Dynamic gamma correction

Adaptive texture filtering

NVIDIA NView™ Multi-display technology

NVIDIA Digital Vibrance Control™ (DVC) technology

NVIDIA Video Mixing Renderer (VMR)

That's a heck of a lot of technical jargon, but have no fear, over the next few pages, I'll try to make things a little clearer by defining the terms, and explaining why they are so important, cool, or necessary. Along the way, you'll get to see some images of demos, and some upcoming titles that take advantage of the new GPU's abilities.

Next Page: Features Explained