Bij GamePC hebben ze een preview in elkaar gedraaid over de nVidia GeForce 256. Helaas geen nieuwe info, maar ze weten wel te melden dat de tragische aardbeving in Taiwan geen negatief effect zal hebben op de GeForce 256 productie. Hier heb je een hap uit de preview.
I was taken into the NVIDIA demo room and shown their current demo programs. What I saw was truly impressive. On screen models with well over 100 thousand polygons (most games use models in the 3000 polygon range) running smoothly with several realistic lighting effects like environment map cube mapping. This is similar to bump mapping, but allows for per pixel lighting and looks extremely realistic. The demos were as (if not more) impressive than those I've seen of the Playstation2. Rippling water, facial animation and high-poly models are all possible with this technology and all done with true polygons. Currently, graphics processor use lighting, texturing and shading techniques to achieve similar effects, but the difference in night and day.If you buy a GeForce based product this season, there will be titles available to take advantage of the hardware T&L. Firstly, OpenGL-based games fully support HW T&L. So Quake 3 fans should see performance increases, plus the possibility of some special maps designed with a higher polygon count. Activision's BattleZone II, Acclaim's Shadowman and Halo by Bungie were all mentioned as titles that will be supporting hardware T&L in their graphics pipelines. The upcoming title, The Whole Experience, looks to be an Unreal-killer in terms of graphics and fully supports HW T&L. A quick demo included full trees (not just the sprite or cross-style ones) and a very lush enviroment that really has a sense of being far more real than anything else we've seen on a computer desktop so far.
Overall, hardware T&L is definitely the way computer games will be heading (after gamers see some of the demos, we will expect no less) and the GeForce256 will be leading the way. I have been told that developers are whole heartedly support the new techniques and we will be seeing more and more titles hit the shelves ready for DX7 and HW T&L in the very near future.
