The GeForce FX was Nvidia's fifth generation GeForce graphics card, featuring support for Shader Model 2.0. It aimed to improve on previous GeForce cards with faster core and memory speeds of 500MHz and 250MHz respectively, new anisotropic filtering and video processing capabilities. However, it ended up underperforming compared to AMD/ATI's competing Radeon 9700 and 9800 cards due to its narrower 128-bit memory bus and issues with its mixed-precision shader architecture. This disappointed hardware experts and consumers expecting greater performance.

1. GeForce FX
Introduction
The GeForce FX (codenamed NV30) is a graphics card in the GeForce line, from the
manufacturer NVIDIA.
NVIDIA’S GeForce FX series is the fifth generation in the GeForce line. With GeForce
3, NVIDIA introduced programmable shader units into their 3D rendering capabilities, in
line with the release of Microsoft's DirectX 8.0 release. With real-time 3D graphics
technology continually advancing, the release of DirectX 9.0 ushered in a further
refinement of programmable pipeline technology with the arrival of Shader Model 2.0.
The GeForce FX series brings to the table NVIDIA's first generation of Shader Model 2
hardware support. The architecture was a major departure from the GeForce 4 series.
While it is the fifth major revision in the series of GeForce graphics cards, it wasn't
marketed as a GeForce 5. The FX ("effects") in the name was decided on to illustrate the
power of the latest design's major improvements and new features, and to virtually
distinguish the FX series as something greater than a revision of earlier designs. The FX
in the name also was used to market the fact that the GeForce FX was the first GPU to be
a combined effort from the previously acquired 3DFX engineers and NVIDIA's own
engineers. NVIDIA's intention was to underline the extended capability for cinema-like
effects using the card's numerous new shader units.
The GeForce FX also included an improved VPE (Video Processing Engine), which was
first deployed in the GeForce4 MX. Its main upgrade was per pixel video-deinterlacing
— a feature first offered in ATI's Radeon, but seeing little use until the maturation of
Microsoft's DirectX-VA and VMR (video mixing renderer) APIs. Among other features
was an improved anisotropic filtering algorithm which was not angle-dependant (unlike
its competitor, the Radeon 9700/9800 series) and offered better quality, but affected
performance somewhat. Though NVIDIA reduced the filtering quality in the drivers for a
while, the company eventually got the quality up again, and this feature remains one of
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2. the highest points of the GeForce FX family to date (However, this method of anisotropic
filtering was dropped by NVIDIA with the GeForce 6 series for performance reasons).
The last model, the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, is comparable to competitor ATI
Technologies's Radeon 9800 XT.
The advertising campaign for the GeForce FX featured the Dawn fairy demo, which was
the work of several veterans from the computer animation Final Fantasy: The Spirits
Within. NVIDIA touted it as "The Dawn of Cinematic Computing", while critics noted
that this was the strongest case of using sex appeal in order to sell graphics cards yet. It is
still probably the best-known of the NVIDIA Demos.
Features
The FX features DDR, DDR-II or GDDR-3 memory, a 130 nm fabrication process, and
Shader Model 2.0/2.0A compliant vertex and pixel shaders. The FX series is fully
compliant and compatible with DirectX 9.0b.
DDR Memory
DDR memory, or Double Data Rate memory, is an evolutionary new memory technology
that doubles data throughput to the processor. As an evolution of today's PC133 SDRAM,
DDR leverages the existing production and environment to provide unrivaled PC
performance at an affordable price.
DDR2 Memory
Another big advantage is the support for DDR2 memory. Operating at a blistering 500
MHz frequency on a 128-bit data bus, this interface offers a 16 GB/sec bandwidth. Even
though the memory width is lower than that of the Radeon 9700, the effective bandwidth
is higher for two reasons: the effective frequency is higher with the DDR2 memory and
every bit of data that comes out of the rendering pipeline is compressed in the hardware
before being sent to the memory. One an average, nVidia states that there is a 4:1
compression ratio that occurs and therefore, the resultant memory bandwidth of the card
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3. is effectively raised to 48 GB/secthat's the contents of an entire 40 GB hard disk
transferred in a little under a second!
GDDR3
Graphics Double Data Rate, version 3 is a graphics card-specific memory technology,
designed by ATI Technologies.
It has much the same technological base as DDR2, but the power and heat dispersal
requirements have been reduced somewhat, allowing for higher-speed memory modules,
and simplified cooling systems. Unlike the DDR2 used on graphics cards, GDDR3 is
unrelated to the upcoming JEDEC DDR3 specification. This memory uses internal
terminators, enabling it to better handle certain graphics demands. To improve
bandwidth, GDDR3 memory transfers 4 bits of data per pin in 2 clock cycles.
Vertex Shaders
Vertex shaders are applied for each vertex and run on a programmable vertex processor.
Vertex shaders define a method to compute vector space transformations and other
linearizable computations.
A vertex shader expects various inputs:
1. Uniform variables are constant values for each shader invocation. It is allowed to
change the value of each uniform variable between different shader invocation
batches. This kind of variable is usually a 3-component array but this does not
need to be. Usually, only basic datatypes are allowed to be loaded from external
APIs so complex structures must be broken down[1]
. Uniform variables can be
used to drive simple conditional execution on a per-batch basis. Support for this
kind of branching at a vertex level has been introduced in shader model 2.0.
2. Vertex attributes, which are a special case of variant variables, which are
essentially per-vertex data such as vertex positions. Most of the time, each shader
invocation performs computation on different data sets. The external application
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4. usually does not access these variables "directly" but manages as large arrays.
Besides this little detail, applications are usually capable of changing a single
vertex attribute with ease. Branching on vertex attributes requires a finer degree
of control which is supported with extended shader model 2
Pixel Shaders
Pixel shaders are used to compute properties which, most of the time, are recognized as
pixel colors.
Pixel shaders are applied for each pixel. They are run on a pixel processor, which usually
features much more processing power than its vertex-oriented counterpart
the pixel shaders expects input from interpolated vertex values. This means there are
three sources of information:
1. Uniform variables can still be used and provide interesting opportunities. A
typical example is passing an integer providing a number of lights to be processed
and an array of light parameters. Textures are special cases of uniform values and
can be applied to vertices as well, although vertex texturing is often more
expensive.
2. Varying attributes is a special name to indicate fragment's variant variables,
which are the interpolated vertex shader output. Because of their origin, the
application has no direct control on the actual value of those variables.
Intellisample Technology
While most of the pixel and vertex specifications are focused on DirecX 9.0, the pixie
dust here is a technology called Intellisample that will make even games such as DOOM
3 run faster. Intellisample is a comprehensive set of technologies that includes a new
colour compression engine, improved fast z-clear, dynamic gamma correction, adaptive
trilinear and anisotropic filtering, and anti-aliasing.
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5. The GeForce FX maximises its memory bandwidth by compressing all the data that
comes out of the rendering pipeline before sending it to the memory controller (as
described above). This results in a direct increase in effective memory bandwidth,
allowing for larger and more complex textures. This is noticed especially when the anti-
aliasing is enabled, where the demands placed on the memory bandwidth are greater.
There is a newer algorithm for clearing the z-buffer (for getting rid of obstructed or
invisible polygons) resulting in faster frame processing.
Finally, the card uses various methods for implementing filtering options. The user can
choose between a direct filtering option (trilinear or anisotropic), or a less accurate but a
high performance option. This will result in a lower performance hit compared to running
the card in any one of these filtering modes directly.
Faster core and memory speeds
When it debuts, the GeForce FX is expected to have a core speed of 500 MHz and a
memory speed of 250 MHz (effectively 1 GHz due to the 4x increase, being DDR2). This
is significantly higher than the Radeon 9700's core speed of 325 MHz and 310 MHz
DDR memory.
FX Flow
Given the high core and memory speeds, the card needs to breathe well. Hence, it uses
an advanced cooling system involving the use of heat pipes. In addition to a heat sink on
the critical heat-generating components such as the GPU and memory chips, there are
tiny copper pipes that draw the heat away from these elements. This is implemented
through a special airflow duct in conjunction with the cooling fan, resulting in a large
cooling assembly that takes up the space of two slots in your cabinet!
In newer games such as Stalker or RalliSport, the realism in the models and environment
is unprecedented due to the use of very high polygon-count. Also, the 128-bit colour
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6. support allows for hitherto unseen levels of accuracy in colours and specular highlights in
the game.
The Last Word
While all this technology scientifically translates into more pixels per second, greater
colour depths and better filtering, the truth will be bared when we see shimmers on water
and winking characters on our desktops. Though this card will be out of our financial
boundaries, it does provide a taste of things to come. In time, these impressive
technologies will trickle down to more affordable solutions. So be prepared for the time
when you can feel the knot in the pit of your stomach while you watch a gleaming
Lamborghini Murciilago tear down your screen the only difference being that instead of
watching this with a bag of popcorn, you'll be holding a joystick in your hand! Here's
how the GeForce FX stacks up against other graphics processing heavyweights, spec for
spec.
Specification
nVidia GeForce
FX
ATi Radeon 9700
PRO
nVidia GeForce4
Ti4600
Chip technology 256-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Process 0.13 Micron 0.15 Micron 0.15 Micron
Transistors 125 million 107 million 63 million
Memory bus 128-bit DDR2 256-bit DDR 128-bit DDR
Pure memory
bandwidth
16 GB/sec 19.8 GB/sec 10.4 GB/sec
Pixel fillrate 4 Gigapixel/sec 2.6 Gigapixel/sec 1.24 Gigapixel/sec
Anti Aliased
Fillrate
16 Billion AA
Samples/s
15.6 Billion AA
Samples/s
4.8 Billion AA
Samples/s
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7. Max FSAA Mode 8x 6x 4x
Triangle transform
rate
350 M
Triangles/sec
325 M Triangles/sec 69 M Triangles/sec
AGP bus 1x/2x/4x/8x 1x/2x/4x/8x 1x/2x/4x
Memory 128/256 MB 128/256 MB 128 MB
GPU clock 500 MHz 325 MHz 300 MHz
Memory clock
250 MHz (1000
DDR2)
310 MHz (620
DDR)
325 MHz (650
DDR)
Memory BGA 2.0 ns BGA 2.9 ns BGA 2.8 ns
Vertex shader FP Array 4 2
Pixel Pipelines 8 8 4
Texture Units Per
Pipe
1 1 2
Textures per
Texture Unit
16 8 4
DirectX Generation 9.0 (+) 9 8
Memory
Optmizations
LMA II Optimized
Colour
Compression
Hyper Z III LMA II
Fact File
The pixel shader in the GeForce FX can process 51 billion floating point operations per
second. This
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8. 1. Can render over a hundred Jurassic Park dinosaurs at 100 frames per second
2. Has more floating point power than a Cray SV-1 supercomputer
3. Is 120 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, if converted to metres
The 125 million transistors in the GeForce FX GPU is 3 times that of a Pentium 4
processor
Delays
The NV30 project had been delayed for three key reasons. One was because NVIDIA
decided to produce an optimized version of the GeForce 3 (NV 20) which resulted in the
GeForce 4 Ti (NV 25), while ATI cancelled its competing optimized chip (R250) and
opted instead to focus on the Radeon 9700. The other reason was NVIDIA's commitment
with Microsoft, to deliver the Xbox console's graphics processor (NV2A). The Xbox
venture diverted most of NVIDIA's engineers over not only the NV2A's initial design-
cycle but also during the mid-life product revisions needed to discourage hackers.
Finally, NVIDIA's transition to a 130 nm manufacturing process encountered unexpected
difficulties. NVIDIA had ambitiously selected TSMC's then state-of-the-art (but
unproven) Low-K dielectric 130 nm process node. After sample silicon-wafers exhibited
abnormally high defect-rates and poor circuit performance, NVIDIA was forced to re-tool
the NV30 for a conventional (FSG) 130 nm process node. (NVIDIA's manufacturing
difficulties with TSMC spurred the company to search for a second foundry. NVIDIA
selected IBM to fabricate several future GeForce chips, citing IBM's process technology
leadership. Yet curiously, NVIDIA avoided IBM's Low-K process.)
Analysis of the hardware
Hardware enthusiasts saw the GeForce FX series as a disappointment as it did not live up
to expectations. NVIDIA had aggressively hyped the card up throughout the
Summer and Fall of 2002, to combat ATI Technologies' Fall release of the
powerful Radeon 9700. ATI's very successful Shader Model 2 card had arrived
several months earlier than NVIDIA's first NV30 board, the GeForce FX 5800.
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9. GeForce FX 5800
When the FX 5800 launched it was discovered after much testing and research on the part
of hardware review websites that the 5800 was not a match for Radeon 9700, especially
when pixel shading was involved. The 5800 had roughly a 30% memory bandwidth
deficit caused by the use of a narrower 128-bit memory bus (compared to ATI's 256-bit).
The card used expensive and hot GDDR-2 RAM while ATI was able to use cheaper
lower-clocked DDR SDRAM with their wider bus. And, while the R300 core used on
9700 was capable of 8 pixels per clock with its 8 pipelines, the NV30 was discovered to
be a 4 pixel pipeline chip. However, because of both the expensive RAM and 130 nm
chip process used for the GPU, NVIDIA was able to clock both components significantly
higher than ATI to close these gaps somewhat. Still, the fact that ATI's solution was more
robust architecturally caused FX 5800 to fail to defeat the older Radeon 9700. The initial
version of the GeForce FX (the 5800) was so large that it required two slots to
accommodate it, requiring a massive heat sink and blower arrangement called "Flow FX"
that produced a great deal of noise. This was jokingly coined into the description
'Dustbuster' and graphics cards which happen to be loud are often compared to the
GeForce FX 5800 for this reason. To make matters worse, ATI's refresh of Radeon 9700,
the Radeon 9800, arrived shortly after NVIDIA's boisterous launch of the disappointing
FX 5800, and Radeon 9800 brought a significant performance boost over the already
superior Radeon 9700, further separating the failed FX 5800 from its competition.
With regard to the much-vaunted Shader Model 2 capabilities of the NV3x series, the
performance was shockingly poor. The chips were designed for use with a mixed
precision programming methodology, using 64-bit FP16 for situations where high
precision math was unnecessary to maintain image quality, and using the 128-bit FP32
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10. mode only when absolutely necessary. The GeForce FX architecture was also extremely
sensitive to instruction ordering in the pixel shaders. This required more complicated
programming from developers because they had to not only concern themselves with the
shader code mathematics and instruction order, but also with testing to see if they could
get by with lower precision. Additionally, the R300-based cards from ATI did not benefit
from partial precision in any way because these chips were designed purely for DirectX
9's required minimum of 96-bit FP24 for full precision. The NV30, NV31, and NV34
also were handicapped because they contained a mixture of DirectX 7 fixed-function
T&L units, DirectX 8 integer pixel shaders, and DirectX 9 floating point pixel shaders.
The R300 chips emulated these older functions on their pure Shader Model 2 hardware
allowing the SM2 hardware to use far more transistors for SM2 performance with the
same transistor budget. For NVIDIA, with their mixture of hardware, this resulted in non-
optimal performance of pure SM2 programming, because only a portion of the chip could
calculate this math, and due to programmers' neglect of partial precision optimizations in
their coding seeing as ATI's chips performed far better even without the extra effort.
NVIDIA released several guidelines for creating GeForce FX-optimized code over the
lifetime of the product, and worked with Microsoft to create a special shader model
called "Shader Model 2.0A", which generated the optimal code for the GeForce FX, and
improved performance noticeably. It was later found that even with the use of partial
precision and Shader Model 2.0A, the GeForce FX's performance in shader-heavy
applications trailed behind the competition. However, the GeForce FX still remained
competitive in OpenGL applications, which can be attributed to the fact that most
OpenGL applications use manufacturer-specific extensions to support advanced features
on various hardware and to obtain the best possible performance, since the manufacturer-
specific extension would be perfectly optimized to the target hardware.
The FX series was a moderate success but because of its delayed introduction and flaws,
NVIDIA ceded market leadership to ATI's Radeon 9700. Due to market demand and the
FX's deficiency as a worthy successor, NVIDIA extended the production life of the aging
GeForce 4, keeping both the FX and 4 series in production for some time, at great
expense.
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11. Valve's presentation
In late 2003, the GeForce FX series became known for poor performance with DirectX 9
Vertex & Pixel shaders because of a very vocal presentation by popular game developer,
Valve Software. Early indicators of potentially poor Pixel Shader 2.0 performance had
come from synthetic benchmarks (such as 3DMark 2003). But outside of the developer
community and tech-savvy computer gamers, few mainstream users were aware of such
issues. Then, Valve Software dropped a bombshell on the gaming public. Using a pre-
release build of the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 game, using the "Source" engine,
Valve published benchmarks revealing a complete generational gap (80-120% or more)
between the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra and the ATI Radeon 9800. In Shader 2.0 enabled
game-levels, NVIDIA's top-of-the-line FX 5900 Ultra performed about as fast as ATI's
mainstream Radeon 9600, which cost approximately a third as much as the NVIDIA
card. Valve had initially planned on supporting partial floating point precision (FP16) to
optimize for NV3x, however they eventually discovered that this plan would take far too
long to accomplish. As said earlier, ATI's cards did not benefit from FP16 mode, so all of
the work would be entirely for NVIDIA's NV3x cards, a niche too small to be worthy of
the time and effort especially at a time when DirectX 8 cards such as GeForce4 were still
far more prevalent than DirectX 9 cards. When Half-Life 2 was released a year later,
Valve opted to make all GeForce FX hardware default to using the game's DirectX 8
shaders in order to avoid the FX series' poor Shader 2.0 performance.
Note that it is possible to force Half Life 2 to run in DirectX 9 mode on all cards with a
simple tweak to a configuration file. When this was tried, users and reviewers noted a
significant performance loss on NV3x cards, with only the top of the line variants (5900
and 5950) remaining playable. However, an unofficial fan-made patch (which optimized
the Half-Life 2 shaders for GeForce FX) allowed users of lower-end GeForce FX cards
(5600 and 5700) to comfortably play the game in DirectX 9 mode and considerably
improved performance on the GeForce FX 5800, 5900 and 5950 graphics cards. But this
only proved that the GeForce FX was a poor performer if the DX9 shaders are not
optimized for its architecture.
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12. Questionable tactics
NVIDIA's GeForce FX era was one of great controversy for the company. The
competition had soundly beaten them on the technological front and the only way to get
the FX chips competitive with the Radeon R300 chips was to optimize the drivers to the
extreme.
This took several forms. NVIDIA historically has been known for their impressive
OpenGL driver performance and quality, and the FX series certainly maintained this.
However, with image quality in both Direct3D and OpenGL, they aggressively began
various questionable optimization techniques not seen before. They started with filtering
optimizations by changing how trilinear filtering operated on game textures, reducing its
accuracy, and thus quality, visibly. Anisotropic filtering also saw dramatic tweaks to limit
its use on as many textures as possible to save memory bandwidth and fillrate. Tweaks to
these types of texture filtering can often be spotted in games from a shimmering
phenomena that occurs with floor textures as the player moves through the environment
(often signifying poor transitions between mip-maps). Changing the driver settings to
"High Quality" can alleviate this occurrence at the cost of performance.
NVIDIA also began to clandestinely replace pixel shader code in software with hand-
coded optimized versions with lower accuracy, through detecting what program was
being run. These "tweaks" were especially noticed in benchmark software from
Futuremark. In 3DMark03 it was found that NVIDIA had gone to extremes to limit the
complexity of the scenes through driver shader changeouts and aggressive hacks that
prevented parts of the scene from even rendering at all. This artificially boosted the
scores the FX series received. Side by side analysis of screenshots in games and
3DMark03 showed vast differences between what a Radeon 9800/9700 displayed and
what the FX series was doing. NVIDIA also publicly attacked the usefulness of these
programs and the techniques used within them in order to undermine their influence upon
consumers.
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13. Basically, NVIDIA programmed their driver to look for specific software and apply
aggressive optimizations tailored to the limitations of the poorly designed NV3x
hardware. Upon discovery of these tweaks there was a very vocal uproar from the
enthusiast community, and from several popular hardware analysis websites.
Unfortunately, disabling most of these optimizations showed that NVIDIA's hardware
was dramatically incapable of rendering the scenes on a level of detail similar to what
ATI's hardware was displaying. So most of the optimizations stayed, except in 3DMark
where the Futuremark company began updates to their software and screening driver
releases for hacks.
Both NVIDIA and ATI are guilty of optimizing drivers like this historically. However,
NVIDIA went to a new extreme with the FX series. Both companies optimize their
drivers for specific applications even today (2006), but a tight reign and watch is kept on
the results of these optimizations by a now more educated and aware user community.
Competitive response
By early 2003, ATI had captured a considerable chunk of the high-end graphics market
and their popular Radeon 9600 was dominating the mid-high performance segment as
well. In the meantime, NVIDIA introduced the mid-range 5600 and low-end 5200 models
to address the mainstream market. With conventional single-slot cooling and a more
affordable price-tag, the 5600 had respectable performance but failed to measure up to its
direct competitor, Radeon 9600. As a matter of fact, the mid-range GeForce FX parts did
not even advance performance over the chips they were designed to replace, the GeForce
4 Ti. In DirectX 8 applications, the 5600 lost to or matched the Ti 4200. Likewise, the
entry-level FX 5200 performed only about as well as the GeForce 4 MX 460, despite the
FX 5200 possessing a far better 'checkbox' feature-set. FX 5200 was easily matched in
value by ATI's older R200-based Radeon 9000-9250 series and outperformed by the even
older Radeon 8500.
With the launch of the GeForce FX 5900, NVIDIA fixed many of the problems of the
5800. While the 5800 used fast but hot and expensive GDDR-2 and had a 128-bit
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14. memory bus, the 5900 reverted to the slower and cheaper DDR, but it more than made up
for it with a wider 256-bit memory bus. The 5900 performed somewhat better than the
Radeon 9800 in everything not heavily using shaders, and had a quieter cooling system
than the 5800, but most cards based on the 5900 still occupied two slots (the Radeon
9700 and 9800 were both single-slot cards). By mid-2003, ATI's top product (Radeon
9800) was outselling NVIDIA's top-line FX 5900, perhaps the first time that ATI had
been able to displace NVIDIA's position as market leader.
GeForce FX 5950
NVIDIA later attacked ATI's mid-range card, the Radeon 9600, with the GeForce FX
5700 and 5900XT. The 5700 was a new chip sharing the architectural improvements
found in the 5900's NV35 core. The FX 5700's use of GDDR-2 memory kept product
prices expensive, leading NVIDIA to introduce the FX 5900XT. The 5900XT was
identical to the 5900, but was clocked slower, and used slower memory.
The final GeForce FX model released was the 5950 Ultra, which was a 5900 Ultra with
higher clockspeeds. This model did not prove particularly popular, as it was not much
faster than the 5900 Ultra, yet commanded a considerable price premium over it. The
board was fairly competitive with the Radeon 9800XT, again as long as pixel shaders
were lightly used.
The way it's meant to be played
NVIDIA debuted a new campaign to motivate developers to optimize their titles for
NVIDIA hardware at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2002. The program
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15. offered game developers the added publicity of NVIDIA's program in exchange for the
game being consciously optimized for NVIDIA graphics solutions. The program aims at
delivering the best possible user experience on the GeForce line of graphics processing
units.
Windows Vista and GeForce FX PCI cards
Although ATI's competitive cards clearly surpassed the GeForce FX series among many
gamers, NVIDIA may still get the last laugh with the release of Windows Vista, which
requires DirectX 9 for its signature Windows Aero interface. Many users with systems
with an integrated graphics processor (IGP) but without AGP or PCIe slots, that are
otherwise powerful enough for Vista, may demand DirectX 9 PCI video cards for Vista
upgrades, though the size of this niche market is unknown.
To date, the most common such cards use GeForce FX-series chips; most use the FX
5200, but some use the FX 5500 (a slightly overclocked 5200) or the FX 5700 LE,
(which has similar speeds to the 5200, but has a few more pixel pipelines.) For some
time, the only other PCI cards that were Aero-capable were two GeForce 6200 PCI cards
made by BFG Technologies and its 3D Fuzion division. The XGI Technology Volari
V3XT was also DirectX 9 on PCI, but with XGI's exit from the graphics card business in
early 2006, it is apparently not supported by Aero as of Vista Beta 2.
For a long time, ATI's PCI line-up was limited to the Radeon R200-based Radeon 9000,
9200, and 9250 cards, which are not capable of running Aero because of their DirectX
8.1 lineage. Indeed, ATI may have helped assure NVIDIA's initial dominance of the
DirectX 9-on-PCI niche by buying XGI's graphics card assets. However, in June 2006 a
Radeon X1300-based PCI card was spotted in Japan [, so it now appears ATI will try to
contest the GeForce FX's dominance of this niche. Nonetheless, ATI's deployment of a
later-generation GPU in what is likely to be a low-end, non-gamer niche may still leave
NVIDIA with the majority of units sold.
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16. Conclusion
The GeForce FX, codenamed NV30 is a graphics card in the GeForce line. NVIDIA’S
GeForce FX series is the fifth generation in the GeForce line. With GeForce 3, NVIDIA
introduced programmable shader units into their 3D rendering capabilities, in line with
the release of Microsoft's DirectX 8.0 release. The GeForce FX is built using a 0.13-
micron fabrication process unlike the 0.15-micron technology used by the reigning king
of graphics hill, the ATi Radeon 9700. The smaller fabrication process makes it possible
for this card to be laden with 125 million transistors compare this with the 108 million
transistors used by the Xeon MP processor. While this fabrication process does offer
greater density for packing in more transistors and lower heat emission levels, it is a
difficult process to implement.
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