Introduction
The first time we heard about NVIDIA's mysterious 'NV10'-project is now more than 1.5 years ago. Still NVIDIA took time until this 'super-chip' was eventually presented to the public. It's only a month ago that 'GeForce256' was finally unveiled to us, and NVIDIA didn't lose any time to make it available to everyone soon after the announcement, although the schedule got delayed by the Taiwanese earthquake. Creative Labs were even faster than NVIDIA, they released their first boards already last week in Asia and I doubt that it will take much longer until you will be able to buy the '3D Blaster Annihilator' in the US and Europe too. I only wish that the names of those 3D-products wouldn't always have something to do with mass-murder. Since 'Napalm' I'm only waiting for a 3D-product called Hiroshima, Agent Orange or Pearl Harbor.
Anyway, to get back to the topic, what's the news about GeForce? Well, most of you will certainly have read several articles about its architecture elsewhere, and while we at Tom's Hardware don't claim to fame with regurgitating presentations or white papers, I will try and keep my summary of GeForce256 short. For those of you who require more information I deeply suggest visiting , where you can find all the white papers and presentation material you need to keep dreaming about the GeForce GPU all night long.
This is the GeForce256 reference board with single data rate SDRAM, actually made by Creative Labs and thus identical to '3D Blaster Annihilator'.
The GeForce256 reference board with DDR-SGRAM looks like this.
