NVIDIA has finally let the cat out of the bag (or changed the world as it says on their web site) on their next generation part. We can't, however, reveal the identity of the lucky winner who named the next generation NVIDIA chip the GeForce 256. But we can tell you that the new name has been finalized, therefor the NV10 code name is no more. The name is fairly simple in its meaning. The "Ge" is short for 'geometry' (not General Electric) the 256 is a reflection of NVIDIA's new 256-bit architecture (the TNT2 was 128-bit). This leap in architecture should, in theory, give way to faster frame rates at higher resolutions such as 1024x768.
The 480M pixels/second fill rate of the GeForce 256 is a step forward in comparison to the TNT2 Ultra's 350Mpixels. According to NVIDIA's white papers, it should be more than capable in the polygon count department with over 15 million per second.
NVIDIA will be touting the GeForce 256 this week at Intel Developers Forum as a Graphics Processing Unit, or GPU for short. This is because of the addition of transformation and lighting 'on-chip', with the geometry calculation stage of the 3D pipeline to be off-loaded from the CPU. Concurrently, the CPU should have the added bonus of more bandwidth, which should allow game developers the ability to focus the CPU upon improving the level of physics and AI, should they choose to implement hardware T&L.
As well as the much talked about hardware T&L support, potentially the most performance impacting feature implemented into this hardware, GeForce 256 will also sport some visually impressive features as yet unseen. Cube Environment Mapping (supported in both DX7 and OpenGL) should pave the way towards more realistic environments via real-time reflections and better lighting effects. After seeing this technology at Meltdown, we could tell that NVIDIA was ready to rock the boat. By snapping shots from the center of a scene in each of the six directions of a cube (four compass points plus up and down) and projecting this textured cube onto surfaces within the scene, a striking approximation of real reflections and light effects are created. Enough is there that the mind fills in the gaps and there are momentary "flashes" of reality.
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