Sursa : The Nvidia GeForce3 launched 25 years ago — underappreciated at launch, its impact shaped the industry
Scriitor : Zak Killian
Credit: nVidia UK
Prezint Highlights:
Lansarea GeForce 3 a survenit la nu mai putin de doar 15 luni dupa lansarea primului GeForce (numit GeForce 256).
A treia iteratie in acest rand de placi gravice a venit cu doua inovatii majore peste predecesori:
* Programabilitate inclusa in chip (suporta instructiuni in timp real dedicate exclusiv procesorului grafic // GF 1 si GF 2 doar randau ce le dicta CPU dupa ce efectua el procesarea);
* DirectX 8.0 ;
* PixelShader Support;
* Vertexshader Support.
This sounds insane from a modern perspective; what do you mean, early graphics processors couldn't run programs? But it's true; before the GeForce 3, virtually all graphics processors were "dumb" fixed-function accelerators. You would hand them data in a specific format from the CPU, they would do their magic, and then output the modified framebuffer. Any code you wrote ran on the CPU, which meant that any special graphical effects you wanted had to be performed on the CPU.
This doesn't just have performance implications, but rather it limits how useful the graphics processor can actually be. For effects like skeletal animation, moving the processing onto the GPU allows for things like matrix palette skinning, that allow textures to stretch realistically across a character. DirectX 8 enabled radically more lifelike water effects, as seen in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and it also famously enabled per-pixel lighting and true Dot3 bump-mapping, as seen in Doom 3.
Motivul pentru care nu la mult timp a aparut GeForce 4 in schema este ca placa in sine nu prezenta o performanta in FPS net superioara unui GeForce 2 PRO, ba GeForce 2 Ti (care a aparut DUPA lansarea GF 3 - ironic) era mai performant decat FeForce 3 Ti 200.
Abia cu modelul GeForce 3 Ti 500 au reusit sa scoate o placa high end serioasa.
Si DA, introducerea terminologiei Ti (Titanium), nelipsita pentru modelele din ziua de azi, atunci s-a introdus !
La GeForce 3 !
Credit: original Tom's Hardware review of the GeForce 3 in 2001 // Thomas Pabst/Future
You see, the GeForce 3 brings along awesome DirectX 8 graphics features, but it has exactly the same raw raster performance (fillrate) as the GeForce 2 Pro. Its only real benefit in DirectX 7 and lower games is its "Lightspeed Memory Architecture," a then-advanced crossbar memory controller that drastically improved effective memory bandwidth considerably. That gave it a real performance advantage at higher resolutions, but if you were only concerned about Quake III Arena in 800x600, it looked underwhelming.
This was partially rectified later in 2001 by the launch of the GeForce3 Ti500. Yes, the GeForce 3 is also the genesis of the familiar "Ti" appellation still used on NVIDIA cards today. Whether you say it "tie" or "tee-aye", it originally referred to "Titanium Edition", and it was applied in October 2001 to two new models of GeForce 3 as well as a new GeForce 2 model that served as NVIDIA's budget offering at the time. The GeForce 2 Ti offered incredible value for the legacy games of the day, but it lacked the passport to the future that the GeForce 3 Ti200 provided. Without that DX8 support, you couldn't tick the 'shiny water' box in Morrowind, so that made the previous-gen GeForce card much less desirable.
GeForce 4 a venit dupa cum spuneam, nu mult mai tarziu si a completat lipsurile predecesorului consacrandu-se ca unul dintre cele mai reusite modele scoase de nVidiosi:
The GeForce 4 continued the legacy of the GeForce 3, bumping Direct3D support from version 8.0 to 8.1. This added features like volumetric texturing (3D textures) and dependent texture reads, which allow the GPU to use the color data from one texture to calculate the coordinates for another. Of course, the real generational jump was in the expansion of both pixel and vertex shader capabilities as well as huge improvements in pure raster throughput and memory bandwidth.
GeForce 6 s-a lansat in Aprilie 2004 si a adus noutati in materie de instructiuni si nu numai:
* DirectX 9.0c
* Shader Model 3.0
* HDR
Geforce 8 a incheiat revolutia grafica in 2006.
Modelul TESLA (ca asa fu botezat) deja a consacrat directia arhitecturala (CUDA cores) in care tot ce vedem pana si in ziua de azi pe piata se deplaseaza.
Multiple nuclee programabile fara functii statornice definite cu care poti efectua programari din cele mai intense, de la randari la cripto.
But it was really the GeForce 8 series where things took a drastic turn. Launched to much fanfare in late 2006, the GeForce 8 series was the launch of the Tesla microarchitecture. Tesla was NVIDIA's first design with fully unified shaders. That meant that there was no longer a split between pixel and vertex shaders; the GPU was now a fully programmable processor with far fewer of the limitations that existed before. It's no coincidence that the GeForce 8 series launched alongside the first version of CUDA, NVIDIA's proprietary compute framework.
That's the key to all of this. You can draw a straight throughline from the launch of the GeForce 3 directly to NVIDIA's current dominance of the AI market. Once you have massively parallel programmable processors sitting in millions of PCs worldwide, some folks start to wonder what else you can run on them besides games. That's when General Purpose GPU (GPGPU) computing came about. In the early days, it was mostly about scientific computing, folding@home, physics sims, and academia. Then came cryptographics, and then cryptocurrency; folks reading this likely remember the GPU shortages caused by that craze. Nowadays, it's almost exclusively about AI.
