Nvidia Geforce 4 (NV25) Information

msolnik writes: "nV News has a brief article about the long-awaited NV25-based video adapters. These graphics processors have similar capabilities compared to the XGPU, and are a lot more powerful than GeForce3 Ti500. Since they are manufactured using .13 micron technology, they will probably be clocked at very high levels."

Re:Power without Application?

[alen]

That's what they said about the Voodoo2, the P2 chips and almost every new cpu that comes out. Until a game I play has real time 3d graphics that are totally lifelike we're not there yet. And I mean every little pore on the characters faces is individually bump mapped and rendered and real arm movement.

The enviroments still look crappy. It's just large polygons with painted edges. And were no where near enviroments that react realistically to your actions.

Re:eh?

[hexix]

Yeah but it's no big deal. You must get 2 year old hardware nice and cheap, seeing as all the new stuff is never even taken advantage of til its about 2 years old.

Re:Power without Application?

[Namarrgon]

There's always one, isn't there...

One good reason to improve speed is simply better AA. Bet your card still shows those unsightly jaggies? Textures shimmer as they pass by, moire on the staircase, distant telegraph poles popping in & out of existance? Turn on 4-sample AA. Oh dear, now it's too slow. But not on my GF3, with anisotropic filtering turned up. I just wish I could do more than 4 samples.

Want more realism? Bump mapping everywhere? Gloss maps? More translucent surfaces? Detail & dirt maps? Specular highlights? More objects in the scene (i.e. more overdraw)? Guess you're going to need a lot more fillrate too.

Here's some more reasons, this time for better polygon handling - real-looking trees. Smooth, organic surfaces. Huge, detailed outdoor scenes that aren't always hidden by that strange vertical fog. Realtime, dynamic shadow volumes. And of course, accurate reflections. If you want to see the trees reflecting in the water, you have to render all those polygons twice. To see all the buildings in your nice shiny car, a cubic environment map is a good way, but requires the entire scene to be rendered six times!

And we haven't even started getting to the interesting stuff. Anisotropic pixel shaders, vertex shaders for displacement mapping or nice rippled reflections. Overbright textures for really nice highlights (or for running realtime Renderman shaders :-) Maybe some really computation-heavy stuff - ray traced surfaces, realtime radiosity solutions or global illumination.

Not enough? I'd like that all in stereovision too, please. Better double that workload again. Or perhaps on each wall of an immersive room? 5x more rendering.

DOA3 looks really, really nice on my Xbox, but I can't help thinking how much better it'd be at 1600x1200 with AA. Or with some of the other refinements I've mentioned above. Sadly, the hardware still isn't there yet...

Believe me, the field of 3D has a lot of room to grow yet.

Driving down the price of GEForce 3..

[thumbtack]

Perhaps this will start to drive down the price of the GEForce 3 to more affordable levels. $300 Plus for a video card is just a bit much. Thats a 100GB hard drive, a new high end motherboard and processor, a ton of memory, or a larger monitor. I don't need to see the pores and zits on on my warrior to have a good experience.