Steven Posted January 19, 2003 Share Posted January 19, 2003 GeForce FX Derivatives NV31 and NV34 Will Not Support All DirectX 9.0 Features? Posted 1/19/03 at 11:41 am by Anton The situation around the GeForce FX-based products is finally more or less clear: the first graphics cards should start to appear in February, while in March there will be a lot more of such solutions, as Nvidia?s partners will finally get more cards to sell. Now we should talk a bit about the derivatives from the NV30 architecture, namely the code-named NV31 and NV34 VPUs. The GeForce FX was quite hard to develop, as it combines a lot of techniques from NVIDIA and 3dfx guys. The result of such collaboration is clear: NVIDIA managed to develop the most feature-rich product, but had to get through various obstacles on the way to build the actual silicon chip working at high frequencies. There is a huge disadvantage in such approach: after a company launches a high-end graphics processor with loads of innovative hardware capabilities, they also have to make a not very expensive mainstream solution, so that the feature-set gained popularity on the market and game developers start to utilise these features. In case there is only one product to support a feature, there will be a very few game developers who will implement this feature in their games, thus, there will be fewer customers to buy the high-end graphics cards. Apparently, the NV31 and NV34 code-named products reportedly do not support all the features their elder brethren GeForce FX does. The NV31 is expected to utilise numerous technologies introduced in the GeForce FX VPU and also offer comparable performance to the GeForce4 Ti4600, but with possible improvements in antialiasing and anisotropic filtering speed. The NV31 is here to substitute the GeForce4 Ti4600 from the performance market segment. Generally speaking, the NV31 code-named products will compete with the RADEON 9500 PRO and 9700-based solutions, so, it is very logically for them to be cheap enough. The NV34 is planned as a next-generation mainstream solution for desktop PCs. The NV34 core will eventually be found in mobile computers and afterwards integrated in the next-generation of nForce core-logic sets. NVIDIA has not confirmed the information, but said that both VPUs mentioned here derive from the NV3x architecture. I believe that the company will try to embody a number of the GeForce FX features via the software in case they are not supported by hardware, hence, the NV34 and NV31-based solutions will still be able to perform advanced effects, but using the CPU of the system. http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1042994509 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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