On November 18th 2002, I was lucky enough to be able to go to the launch of the new Geforce FX technology. Instead of carrying on to the rather obvious Geforce 5, they have named this range as such because this is the first GPU that incorporates technology from the consumed 3dFX.

nVidia believe the GeForce FX is the dawn of "Cinematic Computing". What this means is the ability to have cinematic quality animation (such as Monsters Inc. or Final Fantasy) but in real-time with full interactivity. The GeForce FX can do this due to it's High-Level CG compiler.

The card is of course fully Direct X 9.1 compatible and can support up to 65,000 vertex shader instructions and 2000 pixel shader instructions unlike the Radeon 9700 Pro which supports only 1000 and 96 respectively. This makes it compliant to the 2.0+ specs for pixel and vertex shaders instead of just 2.0. With support for so many instructions, some very complicated CG scripts can be run.

So how is it capable of all this? The GeForce FX uses a 500mhz core and uses DDR2 memory clocking in at a whopping 1ghz. To get the chip to 500mhz they have had to make the shrink to 0.13 micron and use copper interconnects. They also use flip-chip technology which until now was only used in the Radeon 9700 Pro. This die shrinkage means the chip runs cooler and consumes up to 36% less power. This lower power consumption is turned straight into performance by putting more power back into the chip.

This chip contains 125 million transistors capable of 200 billion flops (floating point operations per second), which is 35 times the complexity of the RIVA 128 chip released just 5 years ago.

This card has the sort of exotic cooling you would expect to see in an overclockers machine. It utilizes heat-pipe technology and has a ventilation system that takes up an extra expansion slot. This is well worth while as the extra slot contains an air inlet and outlet for the system. It takes the cold air in from outside, cools the card and expels the air. This means the cooling of this card is completely independent to the case air - allowing for a cooler card AND a cooler case temperature.

With all this cooling noise can be an issue - but nVidia have stepped in here too. When you are using your computer for office work, the last thing you want is a noisy fan bugging you, so they have introduced a system called Silent Running. This is very similar to Intel's SpeedStep technology. Using software it monitors the temperature of the core, current and pipeline usage and can then vary the speed of the chip and of course the voltage of the fan cooling it accordingly. This uses an on-chip diode which can be read from the driver control panel.

With all this advancement in technology they have still managed to keep with the Unified Software Architecture, meaning still just one driver download!

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