NV20 Specifications????

[CraZyDayZ]

I was wondering what the new generation of cards is going to bring. Is there going to be anything else to offer to us then just an exceptionally fast card.


How much more speed do we need????


Thanks Guys....

 

[BurnItDwn]

Nvidia never really released all that info ... just small tidbits ...

supposedly its supposed to be somewhere between 2 and 4 times faster then GF2 ultra ...

but we will just have to wait and see .... i think it will depend mostly on the Ran bandwidth ... unless they get a nice HSR setup working ... which would be a nice treat for us 1600x1200 obsessed people ... (i only game in 1024x768x32 or 1280x1024x16 right now with Geforce DDR ..)

 

[SlimHarpo]

Best you can do now is take a look at some of the Xbox screenies that are showing up. IGN has some nice ones. Malice looks pretty cool already; all that bump-mapping (?) certainly gives a different look than today's games.

 

[BenSkywalker]

MSAA- Has the same good points of FSAA, but without the blurring. This would have been part of Rampage too(so it should be quite a bit better then 3dfx's FSAA). With MSAA, you also have a comparitively tiny performance hit, no fillrate and roughly 50% or less of the bandwith for FSAA.

Pixel/Vertex shaders. There are a lot of truly cool effects that can be done using these. Now that DX8 has native support and the NV20 along with RadeonII have support we should see games that use some of these tweaks.

~Vertex Morphing- ATi's Radeon already has this, the NV20 will also. This could be really sweet for doing something like a person talking. Instead of a hinge for a jaw, people will look like they are actually talking.

Programmable T&L- This solves the only major gripe I have seen regarding current T&L, lack of flexibility. This, combined with the time T&L boards have had on the market(much larger installed base), should push developers to start supporting high geometry models for their games more often.

EMBM- No nVidia board to date has supported this, the NV20 will.

Volumetric Textures- Actual 3D textures, they don't require any polygons to be mapped to. Not sure exactly how popular they will be, but the concept sounds interesting at least.

Effective fillrate- While this is mainly a speed issue, it still will be nice to have ~1.5-2GTexel effective fillrate in 32bit color. 1600x1200 32bit could be over 100FPS in Quake3 with everything cranked(GF2U hits about 60 now).

Raw poly power- With the flexible geometry engine, and support for HOS, the NV20 should easily handle geometric jumps of an order of magnitude over even the best game in that aspect now(probably Giants).

500MHZ RAMDAC- While many will say this isn't needed, the issue that current nVidia boards have with 2D when paired with certain monitors should be gone. It is very possible that they may compete or best Matrox in 2D quality.

MPEG2 Decoding- The GF series of boards already offers some, and I'm not certain the NV20 will offer more, but MPEG2 acceleration is now part of DirectX so they may have a superior solution compared to what is currently available in video cards.

That's all I can think of, and of course almost of that is pure speculation(I'm not currently under any NDAs involving the NV20), but nVidia has said several times that they will have a fully compliant DX8 part so the features should be right, the performance is a best guess based on rumors and facts that we know about the chip right now.

 

[kami]

Thanks for the specs *drools*

 

[Orbius]

Nv20 whats the point? Until the PC equivalent of the X-Box graphics card is released theres no real reason to upgrade. Probably at least 50% of gamers still have a V3 or TnT2 class of card. It will be 6 months before most games are designed with a GTS 2 in mind let alone an Nv20. If it came out at like $250 I might give it some consideration, but the price rumors of $400+ seems pretty nutty to me.

 

[kami]

<< Probably at least 50% of gamers still have a V3 or TnT2 class of card >>


Try 50% of people have a V3 alone!

But who cares? Some of us like having the fastest. I think a 1GHz CPU and a NV20 will be a pretty sweet pair.

 

[Zeeliv]

<< Nv20 whats the point? Until the PC equivalent of the X-Box graphics card is released theres no real reason to upgrade. >>



The Xbox GPU is the NV2a, a modified NV25 which is simply the refresh part of the NV20. They are the same architecture.

 

[Orbius]

I thought that too, but I recently read an interview with someone from Nvidia who said that an X-Box equivalent card would be released at the same time the X-box was released. So obviously the Nv20 is not up to an X-Box level.

 

[Biggs]

500Mhz RAMDAC eh? How high of a resolution can something like this achieve?

 

[Sunner]

nVidias current problem with 2D is not the RAMDAC but rather the RMI filters, as has been proved by those daring souls who have modified their GF's for better 2D.

 

[BenSkywalker]

Sunner-

The filters are reducing the effective frequency throughput to the monitor, a fast enough RAMDAC should eliminate this issue. Not to mention, with that level it seems that nVidia is very concerned with their 2D IQ, they likely will be a bit more strict with the reference design.

Orbius-

&quot;I thought that too, but I recently read an interview with someone from Nvidia who said that an X-Box equivalent card would be released at the same time the X-box was released. So obviously the Nv20 is not up to an X-Box level.&quot;

The X-Box will be ~NV25 hardware. The NV20 should be completely feature complete, likely a ~25% clock difference(200MHZ vs 250MHZ) will be the &quot;big&quot; difference.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

Hmm I wonder how expensive it will be 500MHz ramdac. What about memory I hope they will do like they did with the original GeForce(slower memory than TNT2 Ultra) because if not it will be way too expensive.

 

[Zeeliv]

<< I thought that too, but I recently read an interview with someone from Nvidia who said that an X-Box equivalent card would be released at the same time the X-box was released. So obviously the Nv20 is not up to an X-Box level. >>



As I said, the &quot;X-box equivalent card&quot; you are talking about is NV25 which is the refresh (read: higher Mhz core and memory) part of the NV20. I'll repeat: they are the same architecture

 

[passign]

<< supposedly its supposed to be somewhere between 2 and 4 times faster then GF2 ultra ... >>




Hmmm, last I remembered hearing, it was more like 50% faster than the GTS Ultra, but I could be mistaken. In fact, I hope your right. If you are, it will be the second peice of hardware that I've ever pre-ordered

 

[Sunner]

<< they likely will be a bit more strict with the reference design >>



Thats what Im hoping for.
Just upping the RAMDAC speed to unheard of levels is the wrong way to solve the problem IMO.

But really, though Im having a hard time believing the $500 rumors, NV20 cards will no doubt be rather expensive, and a stricter spec for the filters shouldnt add that much in the big picture.