GeForce 256 Press Conference verslag

Ja luitjes, hier nog wat meer GeForce 256 voor jullie. Thresh's FiringSquad heeft namelijk een verslag geschreven van de press conference van nVidia, waar zij natuurlijk aanwezig waren. Het meeste dat erin staat is niet echt nieuw, maar wat wel interessant is, is het Q&A met nVidia zelf. Zie hier een paar vragen:

[Q] When is the next part coming out? Will it be a new architecture or a clocked up GeForce 256?

[A] NVIDIA is on a 6 month product cycle, so the next big product will be announced at that time. None of the NVIDIA representatives would confirm or deny that the next product (NV15) would be a new architecture or just a clocked up GeForce 256.

[Q] The board supports up to 128MB but what will a typical board have?

[A] Dan Vivoli informed me that most of the first run of GeForce 256 boards will mostly have 32MB, and that 32MB is all you're really going to need. Probably a couple of the OEMs will create some hardcore boards with 64MB or more, but that will drive up costs to an even greater degree.

[Q] What price range are we talking about for the boards?

[A] This is another issue that NVIDIA danced around but understandably so - it's the OEMs who sell the boards and set the prices so NVIDIA is in no position to say how much the boards will cost. Huang did mention that graphics cards consistently increase in price with each generation, so based on that and the fact that TNT2 Ultras retail for $200-$230, and G400 Max's range from $200-$250, we'd say it's safe to assume that GeForce 256s will launch around the $300 mark or even a bit above.

Lees hier verder!

Reacties (1)

Op pagina 4 staan een paar Quake3 benchmarks:

"At "16x12x16" (which we assume means 1600x1200x16bit color), GeForce 256 gets 33.1 frames per second while the TNT2 Ultra is about half as fast at 17.5 frames per second."

Verder op pagina 5 een stukje over de fillrate van de GeForce:

"Possibility 1 is that all of the attention has been placed on GeForce 256's geometry calculation engine, and texture fill rate was not significantly improved (at least by the same 2-4x improvement as everything else). Most likely this would mean a 480 Mtexel/sec texture fill rate, nothing worth reporting for this generation of product, especially when S3's Savage2000 will run at 700Mtexel/sec or at 175MHz or 800Mtexel/sec at 200MHz.

Another, more likely possibility is that the GeForce 256 does the expected - they process two textures per pixel through four pipes, giving up to 960Mtexel/sec. Now that's something to write home about. So why is it such a huge secret so far? Nvidia might be lying low on the number and waiting for 3dfx to disclose texture fill-rate numbers for their next-generation product, which many rumors have as exceeding 1000 million texels per second (putting it on-par with the announced specs for Bitboys' Glaze3D).

Whatever the reason, we know where the G3Force's strengths lie. Someone asked about texture fill rate at the conference and Jen-Hsun Huang mentioned that fill rate is important but that it's all about the geometry. That's not a surprising reaction, given that geometry acceleration is the big thing that GeForce has over anyone else."