Texture and Graphic Imporvements
So it far exceeds the latest API from Microsoft, and when considered with NVIDIA's in-house Cg programming language, along with the extra flexibility offered by DX9.0, the GeForce FX is the most programmable GPU to date. Expect to see truly lifelike graphics before long. DirectX 9.0 also provides support for more extravagant forms of shading known as procedural. To see just what it can achieve when coupled with a state-of-the-art GPU, look at the picture below. Note that none of it uses pre-computed textures.
Pure gaming image quality has become increasingly important of late. Antialiasing, one form of image enhancement, had previously taken a large performance hit on the GeForce4 Ti 4xxx series of cards.
The GeForce FX uses a brand new, proprietary form of loss-less data compression with a 4:1 compression ratio for colour information. The compression is implemented on a hardware level and compression /decompression takes place in real time. Being able to perfectly compress data to such a degree pays enormous dividends for memory efficiency. Just think about it for a second. That effectively makes antialiasing (where you sample at a higher resolution and incur massive bandwidth penalties, free, as you're saving huge amounts of bandwidth with the loss-less compression).
Speaking of antialiasing, the GeForce FX offers 8x F.S.A.A under both OpenGL and Direct3D. Additionally, it offers NVIDIA's proprietary 6XS F.S.A.A in Direct3D. Couple those with the loss-less colour compression and you'll get playable frame rates with 8x F.S.A.A applied. Another notable feature includes adaptive texture filtering. In a nutshell, algorithms carefully select trilinear and various anisotropic filtering modes based on performance. If the filtering is slowing the gameplay down too much, the adaptive filtering's algorithms automatically adjusts it accordingly. Sounds good in practice.
