It was with great enthusiasm that we first reported on NVIDIA's GeForce3 with its programmable vertex and pixel shaders that would forever change the way developers wrote their games. However, when we first previewed the product, driver delays and a complete absence of DirectX 8 benchmarks led NVIDIA to keep all performance details under wraps. Understandable, we thought, considering the architecture providing the GeForce3's force looked much like what we'd already seen on GeForce2 Ultra cards. Mainly, four pixel pipelines, each equipped with two texture units all pumping out 3D scenes, backed by 64MB of 460MHz double data rate memory.

Since that time, MadOnion.com has successfully launched their follow up to the popular 3D Mark 2000, aptly named 3D Mark 2001. Additionally, Massive has polished up a demo of their upcoming DirectX 8 title, Aquanox. These two events were apparently sufficient for NVIDIA to consider distributing review samples, because we finally received a GeForce3 card along with the most breathtaking 3D demos to ever grace our monitors.