TotalRecall
06-24-2001, 09:53 PM
nV News (http://www.nvnews.net/) has a small article up on the new Geforce 3 engine, which enables the processing up to four texture layers in a single pass, whereas the older GeForce 2 pipeline only had the benefit of processing four two-layered textures in a single pass. Because of this, the GeForce 3 has the ability to "skip" a texture pass, increasing the overall speed of the chipset. Here's a snip:
An interesting technical aside: when I first changed something I was doing with five single or dual texture passes on a GF to something that only took two quad texture passes on a GF3, I got a surprisingly modest speedup. It turned out that the texture filtering and bandwidth was the dominant factor, not the frame buffer traffic that was saved with more texture units. When I turned off anisotropic filtering and used compressed textures, the GF3 version became twice as fast.
Get their full article here (http://www.nvnews.net/previews/geforce3/multitexturing.shtml).
<font size="1">Source: AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com)</font>
An interesting technical aside: when I first changed something I was doing with five single or dual texture passes on a GF to something that only took two quad texture passes on a GF3, I got a surprisingly modest speedup. It turned out that the texture filtering and bandwidth was the dominant factor, not the frame buffer traffic that was saved with more texture units. When I turned off anisotropic filtering and used compressed textures, the GF3 version became twice as fast.
Get their full article here (http://www.nvnews.net/previews/geforce3/multitexturing.shtml).
<font size="1">Source: AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com)</font>