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Posted by Thomas
McGuire on December 26, 2001
Manufacturer: Creative
Labs Europe Product: 3D
Blaster GeForce 3 Titanium 200
Check
for the lowest videocard
prices.
Perhaps
the main attraction of the GeForce 3 is the new T&L Unit it's equipped with. Of most interest being that
it is Programmable.
That said, given the lacking amount of retail Games that
support DirectX 8/8.1 T&L features I feel it prudent to
not go into much more detail about this & instead insist
you check out the articles on NVIDIA.com
regarding it instead. That said, not to shrug it off by any
means the technology is
impressive & no doubt Games which truly support these
features look astounding & this is a real
leap over what was seen in the GeForce 1 & 2 (&
Savage 2000, cough & ATI Radeon), though the latest
Radeon range supports a higher revision of Pixel Shader
support.
Anisotropic
texture filtering is an advanced, high quality method of
filtering textures. This provides significantly reduced
texture aliasing & maintains texture sharpness over
greater distances. The GeForce 3 Ti 200 supports up to 64
tap anisotropic texture filtering in both OpenGL &
Direct3D (Although with the current 23.11 XP Drivers the
filtering mode is not selectable via the Drivers, rather you
must edit the Registry or use a 3rd party
Application such as NVmax, shown below).
The
screenshots beneath illustrate the effect each mode has on
image. For reference Trilinear filtering is enable
in all of the screenshots, along with the appropriate
Anisotropic level. As regards the 64 Tap image the
tear that can be seen in the screenshot does
not exist in the Game itself (Not sure what actually
caused it either as I could reproduce it everytime).
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Trilinear
Texture Filtering
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16
Tap Anisotropic Texture Filtering
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32
Tap Anisotropic Texture Filtering
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64
Tap Anisotropic Texture Filtering
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The
image quality benefit is quite obvious & enhances the
image a great deal, with much greater detail being visible
as you can see. That said, there’s a frame rate penalty to
get this improved texture quality. In the Performance
section we’ll see just how much of a hit you could expect.
One
of the nagging issues with the GeForce 1 & 2 was that of
2D image quality. Some Users got around this by taking a
soldering iron to the Card itself. The problem essentially
lay with the cheap RF filters used on the Cards themselves.
The GeForce 3 sets out to change all this however &
rather than using cost cutting methods like cheap RF
filters, higher quality ones have been used this time. As a
result the 2D quality has changed from poor depending on
manufacturer & of course resolution/refresh rate) to
good, although much like everyone else it’s not still as
good as Matrox but
that's to be expected.
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