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Creative Labs 3D Blaster GeForce256 "Annihilator"
...continued

Geometry Performance

The GeForce256 have a quad engine design utilizing a QuadPipe pixel pipeline. The TNT2 have 2 engines and 2 pipelines that can to 1 UV 4-tap, which would result in one bilinear texture application per cycle, per pipeline. The GeForce256 have 2 engines and 4 pipelines, doing 1UV 8-tap, which results in one Anisotropic texture application per cycle, per pipeline. When discussing 32bpp rendering Creative Labs confirmed that there would be a hit when going from 16bpp to 32bpp, albeit not as large as found on the TNT2 (we're not talking just 5 fps here).

The Transform engine is capable of 15 million triangles/sec. The Lighting engine is dot product based and is used with vertex lighting and is capable of doing 1 ambient and 1 directed light in full speed. Add more lights and performance will start to go down. When running a game on a typical CPU the processing power is split between:

50% for graphics calculations, 25% of these are dominated by T&L calculations.
20-30% for computer AI.
20% general purpose I/O (audio, disk-writes etc).
A few percent for when Windows screws up. ;)
With T&L on-board, you will get around 20% of the CPU time back. Not exactly the 50%+ many thought (or wanted), but remember, it's still much better than what the competition can/will offer (apart from S3).

Drivers

At the press event, beta drivers where used and thus the performance can only get better from that day and on. Creative Labs are currently working on RC1 of their drivers and hopefully they'll be done before their October schedule passes. They said that they wouldn't ship a GeForce256 with unfinished drivers, lacking bundle and/or other faults.

We too noticed that the drivers were very buggy when the demos were showcased. During three occasions the computer completely locked and reboot was necessary. Of course, Creative Labs blamed the instability on the drivers (actually the mis-interaction between the way-too-frequently updated DirectX/3D drivers and the beta nVIDIA driver software) maybe heat had something to do with it also?

General Specifications

Graphics Core - 120MHz
Memory size - 32MB
Memory speed - peak 183MHz, default clocked at 166MHz.
No TV-Out (for the European version)
Sub $300 price (the upper sub $300 range)

What may surprise many is the fact that TV-Output has been dropped (at least in the European version) in order to compromise the price. GeForce256 boasts good video playback quality and excellent DVD support, but how fun is it to watch a DVD on your 15" monitor? We would have loved to see a TV-O connector and all the hype on great video etc makes you go "blah!". But the price is definitely a big issue, and the board is already expensive as it is. Adding an additional 32Mb of on-board memory would raise the price to the sub $400 level and make it a very unattractive purchase for many of us. Two full games will be shipped with the 3DBlaster GeForce256, both ready to take advantage of T&L. At the time of the press event what two games would be bundled were still not fully finalized. The question of shipping date was also mentioned, and Creative Labs confirmed an early October release date and reserving a few days in each direction. Which mean that you should expect Creative Labs GeForce256 boards around Sept 26th - Oct 5th. But who knows...

Real World Performance

Creative Labs showed us a whole array of GeForce256 demos, all of them mainly showing the T&L capabilities plus a few new features such as Cube Environment mapping. A few of the demos had framerate counters and Creative Labs said that they were pretty accurate counters. With most of the demos, we saw a rather constant frame rate of 30FPS - with the default features on and at default polygon rates. In the fire truck demo, which contains 100k polygons, the GeForce256 tugged along at roughly 15FPS, not the most impressive score albeit anything else on the market would do that demo much slower.

With the introduction of their TNT2 Ultra board, Creative Labs talked how important it was for graphics chips to achieve a constant frame rate of 60FPS, which the TNT2 Ultra could actually do in many games. This time around, they've completely "forgotten" about their 60FPS commitment and when I talked to some Creative Labs officials they indeed confirmed that with the GeForce256, focus is now on scene complexity and not 60FPS.

The great benefit of the GeForce256 is that you can use a slower CPU and still get the same performance, and you can also run at a much higher scene-complexity and still obtain the same FPS. But when the question of fill rate performance arose, Creative Labs were not shy to say that they would most probably lose to 3dfx.

"When speaking strictly about fill rate, we won't beat 3dfx."

This quote brought forth a surprised faces amongst us. We felt an urge to pop the inevitable question and decided not to hold it back.

"Quake3, 1600x1200 32bpp, highest detail setting. 30FPS?"

We expected (and wanted) a quick YES but that was not the case. In fact they said that is has "most probably not going to happen" but quickly added that performance would indeed increase with final drivers and final silicon. So you won't be able to run Quake3 at 1600x1200 resolution, but who cares anyway? They reported that Carmack was working on adding an additional notch to the "detail lever" for GeForce256 owners to enjoy. (*drool* ;)

Quake2 was also under discussion, and here the GeForce256 did much better. Creative reported that they had Quake2 running at 170FPS in 1024x768 16bpp and no AA. Pretty damn impressive.

With GeForce256 in your machine, you would be more likely to play at "lower" resolutions (1024x768) but at a higher scene complexity. You won't experience sudden boosts or slowdowns in the games due to polygon intensity, rather you will have a constant FPS set by the GeForce256 bottlenecks - fill rate and memory bandwidth. Creative Labs said that the time fill rate reached 1 gigapixel/sec you would no longer worry about that and you can basically do everything (fill rate wise). When that happens, focus will truly be set on on-board T&L and geometry performance. Until then you will still be fill rate bottlenecked.

Overclocking

Many have wondered why the graphics core is set to 120MHz and the main reason is heat and stability (which go hand in hand anyway). With 23 million transistors on board you will definitely have a lot of heat. T&L computations on-board will also account for the lower clock speed. The memory has a peak of 183Mhz but Creative Labs will down clock it to 166MHz to insure total stability.

This time around, nVidia have not supplied manufacturers with the solution on how to overclock the GeForce256 as they did with the TNT2. What's the reason for this? They don't want the same thing to happen with the GeForce256 as with the TNT2, meaning that many companies shipped TNT2 boards at ridiculous clock speeds while just getting a small yield. Creative Labs confirmed that their R&D team have successfully figured out how to overclock the GeForce256 and an overclocking slider will be supplied with the 3D Blaster GeForce256. How much you can overclock depends highly on the game. Dough Hopkins explained that there are roughly 100 - 500 pipeline stages depending on what you do. When overclocking, there is no chance for Creative Labs to know where in those stages things might go wrong. For a game that doesn't utilize T&L you might be able to overclock the GeForce256 by 10MHz (or more?) but in other games using other features you might not be able to overclock at all. One thing is certain though, the GeForce256 runs very hot, and you barely survive with the on-board fan and heatsink. So if you want to try and overclock a GeForce256 card make sure you have efficient and powerful cooling.

At the end of the day, Creative Labs had made things rather clear for us. In fill rate dependent games, "Voodoo4" would most probably be faster, but in polygon intensive games you will see GeForce256 taking the lead. The question remain, how many games will we see take use of the awesome T&L performance found in the GeForce256?

Conclusion

As Creative Labs did not show any real game benchmarks, we cannot give a good judgement on how fast the card will be with real games. But a lot have been said and it is very wise to wait for a 3dfx press release on their Voodoo4 before deciding on what card you will buy. 3dfx have had a reputation as the "kings of fill rate", whether they will prove their position to the world has yet to be seen with a Voodoo4 Press Release.

 

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