Thoughts
NVIDIA have surprised me with NV40. It's rediculously fast compared to R360 in some tests, if you avoid the 8X supersampling mode. But there lies the rub. Shouldn't we expect good high-end antialiasing performance with their latest generation GPU?DX9 performance, at least theoretically, is very strong. The shading performance of NV40 is mighty in some respects. It's got all the features NV3x should have had (and R360 already does in some respects), like multiple render targets and floating point support for everything.
The floating point blending is equally impressive and the gamut of features outlined earlier should give developers everything they need for Shader Model 3.0 development, along with the now correct and somewhat speedy Shader Model 2.0 support.
Emmett Killgaraff's new shader core (if indeed it is his work, I can't confirm) is excellent engineering, something he and NVIDIA should be rightfully proud of. Full, fast, FP32 support everywhere is something that developers can get their teeth into.
Games performance is something I wish I had more time to evaluate. Far Cry and the like deserve a workout on the new accelerator to see if it's up to par in that respect. In this more theoretical performance evaluation, it's fast, more so than I think many will be expecting, but that doesn't always translate into games performance. Remembering that some of that can be the application not making the best use of the hardware, I'm keen to get a retail sample and some more games to play on it.
ATI's R420 shadow looms large too, it's a shame publication of this article couldn't wait until R420 has been evaluated.
News trickles in as to a 512MB GDDR3 Ultra board and the non-Ultra being a 128MB board on the same 256-bit wide memory bus with DDR-I memory. Both of those things we can confirm as fact, but release dates are unknown.
Overall, I'm impressed with the features and the performance. It's nice to see NVIDIA get it more right than they have recently. Shader Model 3.0 performance will be nice to evaluate in the future.
There's been masses I haven't been able to cover, like the programmable video processor, MPEG4 and DivX decoding in hardware, more work with the PSU requirements and much much more. But performance has initially been evaluated and things look promising.
A fast wee beasty with excellent features, and it's currently the fastest, launched, consumer graphics accelerator. We now wait for ATI to see if R420 can match or surpass it.
Editors Note: Got to be said guys - currently this card is the fastest thing we have seen without doubt. We all know ATi is working on something, and we are all waiting to see what it brings, we would post some rumours but there seems to be a lot of conflicting stories out there. After long discussions with NVIDIA they have promised us that they have worked very hard to get the crown back, and they don't intend to have it for just one month. It looks like we have an exciting year ahead!
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