NV20 Preview

[Guest]

...With the capability of executing programmability instructions just like CPU, NV20 strides into a new stage of 3D graphics processor development. For those waits eagerly for NV20, here is a brief preview interpreting the new features of NV20 and how the performance improvement can users expecting at present. In addition, feature survey tables of the NVIDIA based video cards from TNT to NV20 are presented also.

<A HREF="http://www.geocities.com/tnaw_xtennis/NV20-3.htm" target="_new">http://www.geocities.com/tnaw_xtennis/NV20-3.htm</A>

 

[Guest]

for $800 it better be fast

 

[Guest]

Hmmmm... Interesting post but.... The specs listed for the NV20 are drastically different than those listed for the Xbox. Is the difference between them that great? Also, though the memory bandwidth listed on the linked page is greater than the memory bandwidth for the Xbox, the performance specs are lower. Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems odd.

Regards,
Warden

 

[Grizely1]

Not really. It's not like they're going to go and buy some NV20's wholesale and just stick them in the Xbox. Then you could buy the Xbox for 400, take out the graphics card and sell it for 800 and sell the rest of the xbox for 100 and make some serious cash.

 

[Guest]

Nah, no doubt that the Xbox GPU will be incompatible with a PC. If nothing else because the Xbox version will be much more integrated, dumping AGP and using a shared-memory architecture (graphics memory and system memory are one in the same). But it's no secret that the technology behind the Xbox and NV20 is the same. In this link (http://www.zdnet.com/gamespot/stories/news/0,10870,2631156-3,00.html) J. Allard, general manager of Xbox, comes right out and says, "...the NV20 is the core of the Xbox graphics." This indicates to me that the performance abilities should be in the same ballpark. But compare some specs from tnaw's link to the Xbox specs:

tnaw vs. Xbox
poly/sec: 40 vs. 125 (million pollygons/sec)
fillrate: 1.2 vs. 4.0 (gigapixles/sec, single or multi texture)
GPU speed: 300 vs. 250 (MHz)
memory bandwidth: 8.0 vs. 6.4 (GB/s)

The memory bandwidth could easily be different because of the entirely different memory architectures involved... but the other specs should be similar, yet are listed here as *drastically* different. Also, though the NV20 supposedly has a fasted GPU and higher memory bandwidth, the performance is way lower. Now I'm not at all trying to say that tnaw is all washed up or something, just pointing out that something is conflicting somewhere...

Regards,
Warden

tnaw's link: http://www.geocities.com/tnaw_xtennis/NV20-3.htm
Xbox specs: http://www.xbox.com/xbox/flash/specs.asp

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by warden on 01/21/01 00:06 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Grizely1]

This is why consoles will always be inferior to PCs

 

[Guest]

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