|
Lighting and Shading ...
An important improvement of the GF2 is a structural change in
it's Lighting engine. The most important aspect of it is the fact that
the GF2 can calculate multiple lighting techniques per pixel thanks to a
technique called NSR (NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer).
The GF2 can calculate 7 different pixel
operations in one pass/clock cycle per pipeline. Added techniques are
Per-Pixel Bump Mapping, Per-Pixel Diffuse Lighting and Per-Pixel
Spectacular Lighting. While watching NVIDIA's Geforce2 GTS tech demo',s
and recent games, we must say that it really is looking astounding. As with any new generation
of videocard I can say, within the next 6 months I'm sure we'll see some
spectacular enhanced games.
The T&L Engine
As you probably know, the GeForce has a hardware Transform &
Lighting engine (which I believe is truly a fruitful technological
advantage). Compared to the GF 256 the performance has been boosted
quite a lot. The Engine can now calculate 25 Million triangles/sec
compared to the 15 Million from the GeForce 256. It has now been 6
months since the first T&L videocard became available, and luckily
there are several T&L compatible games available, and a lot will be
released quite soon
A newbie in the higher version of detonator drivers (officially called Detonator2 en recently
released
Detonator 3) release was support for Texture Compression. After shaking
hands and burying a cold war with S3 we instantly saw this cool method
integrated in the new drivers. The large advantage from S3TC (S3 Texture
Compression) is that more textures will fit into the videocards memory
making textures bigger, higher quality which results in a clearer and
sharper image.
Full Scene Anti
Aliasing
The GeForce based product range can support Full Scene Anti Aliasing
(FSAA). FSAA removes the so called 'jaggies' from your game. If you draw
a straight line (under an angle) using a paint program and you zoom in,
you will discover that the line kind of looks like a stairway. To
remove this and make the line look like a line points in different
colors are added to the side of the line to make it look more like a
real line.
 |
Anti-Aliased
line - If you
draw a straight line (under an angle) using a paint program and
you zoom in, you will discover that the line looks like a
stairway. To remove this and make the line look like a
line points in different colors are added to the side of the
line to make it look more like a real line. |
You eyes are actually
being fooled by letting you think that it is a straight line without the
stairway effect. FSAA comes at a big price ... and this factor is
performance. In higher resolutions the performance can drop easily 50%
of your costly framerate. At this time do not expect miracles from FSAA.
We can demonstrate FSAA
perfectly, please look at the image below. You'll notice a distinct
difference between the two images. You can use your mouse pointer to
move the lens and see what FSAA does in close-up.
For your information, FSAA
is enabled in the right Porsche picture in the above image. FSAA will
dramatically influence performance, in some cases to an unplayable
scenario.
|
