According to NVIDIA, processing graphics takes raw transistors - there is just no way to skirt the issue. NVIDIA's RIVA 128 processor was comprised of 7 million transistors. The TNT2 crammed 15 million transistors onto a single die, while the GeForce2 upped that number to 25 million. For the sake of comparison, ATI's RADEON is made of 30 million, and Intel's new Pentium 4 processor houses 42 million transistors on a .18-micron manufacturing process!

For the GeForce3, NVIDIA was able to integrate no less than 57 million transistors onto a single die manufactured on TMSC's new .15-micron process. This new logic includes legacy support for static T&L, which will be important for compatibility with DirectX 7 applications.

Like the GeForce2 GTS before it, the GeForce3 architecture utilizes four pixel pipelines, each with two texture units. The two chips are divergent, however, in how these pixel pipelines can be controlled. For instance, on the GeForce2 GTS, a quad-textured pixel would have to be processed twice (once for the first two textures, and again for the remaining two). On the other hand, the GeForce3 can dedicate two pixel pipelines to a quad-textured pixel. Granted, only two of these quad-textured pixels can be processed in a single clock cycle, but it provides developers with more flexibility for effects without as much of a performance hit.

The core itself will be clocked at 200MHz - remember, 57 million transistors is over twice that of the GeForce2 GTS, and heat is undoubtedly a major consideration. A quick calculation reminds us that the GeForce3 will have the same theoretical pixel and texel fillrates as the GeForce2 GTS.

NVIDIA was quick to point out that the "raw power" philosophy they had followed in the past is no longer feasible, as memory bandwidth can easily choke the performance of even the fastest accelerators. Instead, they are shooting for a more refined product, like ATI did with the RADEON GPU. Because of this, we are not expecting the GeForce3 to significantly outperform a GeForce2 Ultra board in today's applications.

All of the retail GeForce3 boards should be shipping with 64MB of DDR SDRAM, so wave goodbye to those paltry 32MB performance boards of last year. Clocked at 230MHz (effectively 460MHz), the GeForce3 will deliver a theoretical memory bandwidth of 7.36GB/s, which can be broken down accordingly:

You'll notice that this figure does not take into account latencies and efficiency losses for the DDR memory. After these factors are taken into consideration the number will be a bit lower, however, we are hoping that NVIDIA's new Lightspeed Memory Architecture will be able to compensate. For more information on the GeForce3's Lightspeed Memory Architecture, please refer to our original preview.