Lighting
and Shading ...
The second
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 we must say that it really is looking astounding.
At
this time there is not one single game which makes advantage of it but hey .. 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.
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click images to enlarge
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| The
images in the right upper corner are taken from several technology
demonstration included on the NVIDIA tech demo CD. They show you
the possibilities and options of the GF2 very well.
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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
.
Coming up - Full Scene Anti-Aliasing
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