GeForce3.

Nvidia tackles more than games

OVER THE PAST two years, Nvidia has come from nowhere to become the leading vendor of PC graphics cards. Its boards are technically advanced, fast, and reasonably priced. For the average consumer, they are hard to beat. The GeForce3 is based on Nvidia's new architecture, which builds on the successful GeForce2 with the addition of faster memory and new features including vertex and pixel shaders.

Nvidia doesn't sell directly to consumers, so the card I reviewed is available only through OEM sources--you might find it inside a Dell or Gateway computer. Or you can get GeForce3 graphics processor-based cards from board vendors such as Elsa, Leadtek, Visiontek, and Creative.

Unfortunately, my review had a shaky start. I powered down the machine, popped open the case, and proceeded to swap out my old GeForce2 card for the GeForce3. When the new card touched the AGP slot, I saw a spark and a small puff of smoke. Before I knew it, both the motherboard and the GeForce3 card were dead. I've replaced dozens of cards before and this has never happened, but I probably should have unplugged my workstation completely, as apparently a small trickle current runs through the board, which caused the short when I inserted it. After several phone calls, a new motherboard, and a new video card, I got down to the review.

In terms of technology the GeForce3 is impressive. The chip has 57 million transistors--15 million more than Intel's Pentium 4 CPU. This hefty dose of silicon offers up some powerful features, so that the card has the ability to render images in hardware that look much like high-end software renders. The GeForce3 is touted as an excellent card for gaming, and it has received good reviews from gaming publications. This review, however, will focus on using the card in a production environment.

The big new features for the GeForce3 are programmable vertex and pixel shaders. The vertex shader doesn't really shade vertices. Instead, it allows developers to manipulate geometry on the video card rather than the CPU. This can include deformations such as facial animation or skinning; lighting, shading, bump mapping; and even motion blur and realistic fur. Complementing vertex shaders are pixel shaders, which allow for a wide variety of effects, including realistic shadows and reflective bump maps.

Another interesting feature is the GeForce3's ability to support higher order surfaces. This allows the card to render patch-based surfaces in real time, tesselating them on the fly. Anti-aliasing has also been improved with the introduction of a new ...