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The GeForce is a phenomenal videocard with
all of today's and near future functions that you would like to
see for a High performance videocard. It is based up-on NVidia's hot chip
called the Geforce 256, a Graphics Processing Unit
(GPU).
Something I'd expected, but did not find
on this card, are the usual 'hot' features. I've seen Gigabyte videocards
with Turbo-Switch for overclocking and Dual Heatsinks (dual cooling).
This card has no 'special' options. The cooling fan is the only
non-standard item on the card, it's a solid DXII-66CPU looking fan
which cools the card down pretty well. The videocard is
almost an exact replica of the reference design from NVidia, except
for the cool blue color of course.
What's in the Box
In the box you'll find of course a GA-GF2560 GeForce 256, a manual, driver CD equipped
with PowerDVD player (30 Day trial), a few game-demo's (Future Cop,
Populous and Superbike) and a full version of Need for Speed III. Installation ran without any problems, remove your old Videocard,
insert the GA-GF2560 GeForce 256 and boot up. After your
boot-up start-up the Gigabyte CD, choose
your platform (Win 2000,Win 9x or
WinNT) in our case win9x, and hit install. After a reboot
you are set to go. (Don't forget to install the DirectX 7 drivers
BTW). 
The driver CD contains drivers for
Win95/98 and Win NT based up-on version 3.6x Detonator drivers from
nVidia. You can get the latest drivers that are available at
the website from GA-GF2560. Furthermore you'll find DirectX 7 on the
CD (you want to install 7 for full compatibility). Too show off your GA-GF2560
GeForce 256
download some hot tech-demo's from www.nvidia.com,
the most important demo's are, TreeMark, Wanda, waves
and Bubble (which I loved the most). The Bubble demo makes use of the
GeForce's Cubic environment mapping. When you touch
the bubble it'll do weird things. Cubic environment mapping somewhat
like Matrox's Bump-Mapping.
Bump mapping is a process used where
the texture bitmap of a 3D object is enhanced by a second map that's
designed to realistically reflect or react to the light in a way that
makes the object appear "bumpy." 3D Cards originally
used "Emboss Bump Mapping", a form of multi-texturing that
approximated the effects of light. 3D Labs, NVidia, and
others have incorporated dot-based bump mapping into their hardware.
It's a nice feature, but to develop a game with bump mapping in mind
programmers would lose out on the time saved by the original
"code once" approach intended with DirectX or miss out on
each individual card's benefits.
Remember the bad guy from
terminator 2 when he walks out of the fire in chrome and he assembles himself from all
those tiny and small liquid chrome bubbles ? That's Cubic environment
mapping.
[ click to enlarge
]
DDR/SDR
The videocard is equipped with 5.5ns Elite SDRAM (Single Data Rate) memory. The GeForce
can actually also handle the new DDR (Dual Data rate) memory (which we will be
reviewing quite soon). When would you actually need DDR based
videocards you might say ? Well, let me try to explain is like this, your geforce with SDR Ram will work
fine in all resolutions and you will enjoy gameplay + framerate in all it's ways, however, for the more demanding gamers
& freaks (like me) you'd probably want a DDR version. At
lower resolutions, the video card isn't pushing more data around than
the memory can handle, but once you get up past 1024 by 768, the DDR
card should start (theoretically) to show significant improvement in
your framerate. The DDR memory allows twice as many memory operations at once
compared to SDR.
This results in twice as many bandwidth.
Reviews show (Take a look at the benchmarks later) the real improvements only show up at
high resolutions, up around 1280 by 960 or higher, which is my all-time
favorite resolution for playing games btw.
Transform & Lighting
What makes the GPU so special compared to a TNT-2 ? Well, it can render scenes in very
complex 3D applications and games without the use or very little use of your processor
due to hardware T&L (Transform and Lighting). The GeForce supports
every hardware accelerated function that for example a TNT-2 does,
however, it has the new added luxury of hardware T&L, a tremendous
step forward for real time 3D rendering.
In this small part we will try to explain Transform & Lighting
(T&L from now on). Transform actually is nothing more then the
transformation of the 3D 'space/data' of your typical game into 2D data.
When you look at your monitor you actually look at a 2D screens. When
you take a photograph with your camera the real world (3D) will be
transformed on a 2D photograph right ? That's what is getting transferred on the GPU/hardware. The
transformation is a tremendous amount of geometric data which will not
be handled by your CPU anymore (if supported by the software).
The "lighting" part is actually
very precise modeling dynamic light on surfaces.
For example, take glass and your your desktop light. Now move the
light around the glass for a while and
look at your glass. The light is reflecting, shining and moving in
several ways, that's Dynamic Lighting on surfaces. Dynamic lighting,
where object or light motion is accurately shown, is an extremely
processing dependant task, especially when you're dealing with
multiple light sources. Your GeForce can handle it with its GPU.
In general see is like this, the more your
videocard does, the less has to be calculated by your processor, the
faster your game will run with better and higher quality.
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