As was mentioned early on in the preview, there are a few intangibles associated with the GeForce3. The most prevalent are the tools that NVIDIA is providing to the developer community. As with any new graphics hardware, it's important that NVIDIA's Developer Relations continues to educate developers in order to effectively make use of the capabilities of the GeForce3.
NV20 Developers Guide
NVIDIA has already introduced its DirectX 8 Development Kit for the content and game developer community. Developers have already begun writing games for the Xbox to coincide with the 4th quarter 2001 debut of Microsoft's console system. From Epic's Tim Sweeney:
"Having used NVIDIA's DirectX 8 Development Kit over the past two months, we are able to deliver much greater realism and visual clarity in our game," stated Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games. "Using the tools provided by NVIDIA, people will enjoy game experiences the likes of which previously existed only in our imaginations." - Tim Sweeney
Sanford Russell, Senior Director of Partner Management, was especially excited about the headway NVIDIA is starting to make in the area of software tools used by game artists. NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture is already certified with industry leading software programs, including 3ds max, Maya, and SoftIMAGE 3D.
The lastest version of 3ds max contains a vertex shader plug-in which allows game artists to see the results of their work without having to rely on a game engine. Previously, the artist was dependent on the game engine to test the artwork. In this case, NVIDIA is bringing the artist and developer closer together.
Other tools that are available to un-registered users at NVIDIA's developer web site include:
- NVIDIA DirectX 8 Software Development Kit - Includes presentations, papers, demos, and tools.
- NVIDIA Shader Debugger - Interactive debugging of both vertex and pixel shaders in DirectX 8.
- NVASM - Vertex and pixel shader macro assembler which integrates with Visual Studio.
- NVShaderAid - Allows programmers to visually prototype shaders for NVIDIA GPUs.
- DirectX 8 BumpMaker - A DirectX 8 version of a bumpmap generation and preview tool.
- Bump Map Generation & Preview Tool - Allows per-pixel lighting and bumpmaps to be applied to 3DStudio files.
- Photoshop Texture Import/Export Plugin - Plugins support reading and writing of various .dds files and support 2D, cube map, and volume textures of different formats.
As you have noticed by now this preview does not contain any performance results. According to NVIDIA, no web sites have been given GeForce3 reference cards to test with due to the immaturity of the Detonator drivers. I can certainly understand this as the GeForce3 has a wealth of new technology that the driver teams need to expose. Think about the complexity associated with the crossbar memory architecture and ensuring that the drivers are optimized to load balance and take advantage of multiple memory controllers. We will keep you updated on the progress of the GeForce3 drivers which will hopefully be resolved within the next few weeks.
Other than that, I'm not going to say much more in regards in the way of a conclusion until I've had a chance to test the GeForce3. Although the memory clock speed is the same as that of the GeForce2 Ultra (460MHz DDR), the memory bandwidth saving features implemented in the GeForce3 appear to offer the potential for a significant increase in 3D performance where memory bandwidth is a constraint. Add to that a programmable graphics processing unit and Quincunx antialiasing and I'm sure you will agree with John Carmack's comments regarding the GeForce3.
No doubt that the initial price of the GeForce3 will be extremely high. Based on the information we've been able to obtain from unofficial sources, the retail price is expected to range anywhere from $500-$600. For that amount of coin, you can bet that we will scrutizie the GeForce3 to the fullest extent once we have it in our hands.
Feedback on this preview is appreciated. Click here to participate.
Next: Quake 3 Arena Performance
