NVIDIA GeForce3

Introduction

Mac users thought they were going to be the ones to get their hands on the Geforce3 first, as promised by Apple CEO Steve Jobs back in Feb. 2001, but in fact it was PC versions of the card that began shipping first, as cards based on the GeForce3 chip began hitting North American shelves at substantially lower prices from Visiontek, Asus and other manufacturers in early May. In fact, the North American release of the cards for the PC platform had also been delayed somewhat, as there had already been a round of cards released in the Far East that were shown to have some BIOS bugs. These issues, our Asian sources tell us, were addressed before the North America release.

Technicalities

The GeForce3 GPU has more than 57 million transistors, and is capable of performing more than 800 billion operations per second — and 76 billion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). It's no wonder Apple CEO Steve Jobs calls it "an astonishing feat of engineering."

One of the most obvious improvements in the new chip is its support for high-res anti-aliasing (HRAA) without the dramatic slowdown that has accompanied similar features in the past. Whereas full-scene anti-aliasing incurred a slowdown of close to 45 percent in the GeForce2 series cards, the GeForce3 manages HRAA with only a 24 percent speed hit.

The GeForce 3, says NVIDIA, performs best when software is optimized for its special capabilities, such as the so-called nfiniteFX engine and Lightspeed Memory Architecture. However, even in games not optimized for the new features gamers will almost invariably notice substantial frame-rate increases. Quake 3, for example, uses OpenGL as its rendering engine, but still manages frames more than 25 percent faster than those achieved by cards based on GeForce2 series chips. The GeForce3 really struts its stuff when combined with a game designed for Microsoft's DirectX 8 3D application programming interface. This is because NVIDIA licensed its vertex shaders and pixel shaders to Microsoft to include in DirectX 8.

Pricing

Products based on the GeForce3 were originally expected to cost  nearly $600 US. Fortunately, NVIDIA apparently came to its senses and lowered chip costs before products began shipping, allowing cards to hit the market initially in the $350 - $400 (US) price range. As always, we expect to see further price drops in the months ahead and differentiating features in products from Absolute Multimedia, ASUStek, ELSA, Gigabyte, Hercules, Leadtek, MSI and other graphics card vendors.

Caveats

Some PC users have noticed that the 2D image quality of some Geforce3 cards isn't all that great. We have seen numerous complaints posted in PC forums. Typically, users complain of a lack of a lack of sharpness at 1600x1200 resolutions (the monitor, too may be a factor at this resolution). However, there have been some reliable tests confirming these findings. A recent Anandtech review/summary of PC GF3 cards rated the Visiontek GF3 and Asus 8200 Deluxe poorly for 2D image quality, in tests at 1600x1200 and above.

Driver

Nvidia on Sept. 10 released an improved set of "Detonator XP" (also known as "Detonator 4") drivers for cards based on its TNT2, GeForce and Quadro series of chips and the performance makes this free upgrade well worth the download. We tested the Detonator XP driver for the company's top-of-the-line GeForce 3 under Windows XP and the performance boost is substantial. In MadOnion.com's 3DMark 2001 benchmark program, the default drivers for Windows XP yielded a score of 5252 in the 4x full-scene anti-aliased display mode. After installing the Detonator XP drivers, this score jumped to 6394.

Similarly impressive were the improvements at higher resolutions. At 1024x768 in 32-bit colour (FSAA off), the standard Windows XP drivers produced a score of 5869. The Detonator XP score was 6983. In short, this is a must-have upgrade for any performance enthusiast with a GeForce 3 card, although users of some older models (the Geforce2 Gts/Pro, in particular) have reported a slight performance decrease after installing the new version. Thus, we recommend it primarily to GeForce 3 owners.

Driver Issues

We've read a few reports of other issues with the Detonator XP drivers: some users report problems setting Vsync and/or AGP4x mode, others note a change in the registry key used by the drivers that makes most prior "tweak" utilities stop working. (The new keys are detailed here). Lastly, it seems that some some users are experiencing "locked" refresh rate related problems after the upgrade. Fortunately, this issue -- which doesn't affect everyone -- is easy to fix, using the procedure detailed at www.nvnews.net. The Detonator 4 drivers are available for Windows 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000 and XP from Nvidia.com.

GeForce Titanium

NVIDIA in Oct. announced three new chips for performance enthusiasts and mainstream users. Notable primarily for higher clock speeds than found in the original GeForce 2 and GeForce 3 series chips, the Titanium lineup is essentially a speedbump update, not a major revision to the line. At the high end, the GeForce3 Ti500 represents a new high end in performance for the company, while the Gf200Ti promises "GeForce3 Performance at Half the Price!" Filling out the new lineup in the Mainstream bracket is the GeForce2 Ti, touting "GeForce2 Ultra performance at GeForce2 Pro prices."

Thanks to ATIC.ca for the loan of the GeForce 3 cards used in our tests.