Introducing The NVIDIA GeForceTM FX The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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The NVIDIA^® GeForce^TM FX GPU ushers in a new era of graphics and gaming. With the GeForce FX powering your graphics experiences, you can run applications and games at higher resolutions and at speeds never before possible. Everything a bleeding-edge gamer desires is packed inside this powerhouse of a processor, including the latest high-speed DDR2 memory, an expansive AGP 8X pipeline and unparalleled Intellisample technology - driving scenes of unrivalled beauty at unmatched speeds.

Power and performance, the two elements every gamer craves, are the heart and soul of the GeForce FX. Powered by pure adrenaline and engineered with a passion for perfection, the GeForce FX delivers cinematic effects beyond imagination. Its CineFX engine produces gaming effects on par with the hottest motion pictures. Combined with the industry's first true 128-bit studio-quality color processing technology, 3D worlds and characters are more real than anything that's come before.

	NVIDIA GeForceTM FX Key Features The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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CineFX Engine
Powers cinematic effects beyond imagination. With advanced vertex and pixel shader capabilities, stunning and complex special effects are possible. In addition, increased horsepower delivers faster and smoother gameplay.

Intellisample Technology
Intellisample's intelligent gamma-adjusted antialiasing and advanced adaptive anisotropic filtering deliver silky-smooth, ultra-realistic visuals at lightning speeds. Say goodbye to the jaggies for good: your current games will benefit immediately from this state-of-the-art technology, and the games to come will positively rock your world.

High-Precision Graphics
By combining the incredible dynamic range of today's state-of-the-art 3D motion pictures with 128-bit studio-precision color, the GeForce FX brings you the industry’s best image quality for the most demanding applications.

nView Multi-display Technology
The nView hardware and software technology combination delivers maximum flexibility for multi-display options, and provides unprecedented end-user control of the desktop experience.
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Digital Vibrance Control (DVC)
Allows the user to adjust color controls digitally to compensate for the lighting conditions of their workspace, in order to achieve accurate, bright colors in all conditions.
Currently this feature is not available on Mac systems.
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Unified Driver Architecture (UDA)
Guarantees forward and backward compatibility with software drivers. Simplifies upgrading to a new NVIDIA product because all NVIDIA products work with the same driver software.
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AGP 8X
Provides double the bandwidth of AGP 4X—2.1GB/sec. vs. 1.1BG/sec. AGP 8X enables more complex models and detailed textures, creating richer and more lifelike environments. Uninterrupted data flow allows for smoother video streaming and faster, more seamless gameplay.
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0.13 Micron Process Technology
Delivers high performance through faster clock rates.

400MHz RAMDACs
Industry’s fastest RAMDACs support QXGA displays with ultra-high, ergonomic refresh rates.

8 Pixels/Clock Rendering Pipeline
Makes all of your favorite games run faster.

Architected for Cg
Ensures that the newest, cutting-edge special effects in applications will run flawlessly. Speeds up content creation so game developers can get their new games out to PC users faster than ever before.

Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Optimizations and Support
Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all DirectX 9 applications.

New 64-phase Video Scaler
Highest quality for scaling DVD and other video to full-screen HDTV resolutions.

OpenGL® 1.4 Optimizations and Support
Ensures the best performance and application compatibility for all OpenGL applications.

Video Mixing Renderer (VMR)
Harnesses the power of the 3D graphics engine to empower the user to view multiple video windows simultaneously with superior quality, and avoids the problems associated with video overlay.

World’s First DDR2 Memory Interface
World’s fastest memory delivers fluid frame rates for even the most advanced applications.

Dual-link DVI
Able to drive the industry’s largest and highest resolution flat-panel displays including UQXGA resolution

	NVIDIA GeForceTM FX Key Features The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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CineFX Engine

As special effects in the latest Hollywood blockbuster films continue to advance at an incredible rate, you’ve come to expect amazingly realistic explosions, true-to-life ocean waves in a sea storm, and incredibly vivid colors in animated features. So there's no reason you should settle for anything less than the best when it comes to your games. Architected for high-level programming languages like Cg, the NVIDIA® GeForce FX GPU’s new CineFX engine produces gaming effects on par with the hottest motion pictures. Combined with 128-bit studio-quality color processing technology, 3D worlds and characters are more real than anything that's come before. Hollywood dreams are now a desktop reality.

The NVIDIA CineFX engine allows developers to easily apply their distinctive style to digital content, achieving cinematic visual effects in real time with specialized graphics programs called shaders. Powered by the CineFX engine, the GeForce FX shifts the focus from simple pixel fill rate to sophisticated pixel shading. The GeForce FX eliminates many programming barriers previously associated with pixel shaders by supporting long programs for even the most elaborate effects, and conditional branching capabilities for greater efficiency. To maximize programming choice, the NVIDIA CineFX engine includes the most complete hardware feature implementation for both OpenGL® and Microsoft® DirectX® environments, including total support for the latest DirectX 9.0 vertex and pixel shader specifications.

The pixie from the NVIDIA Dawn tech demo employs a number of advanced vertex and pixel shading effects. A complex combination of color maps, specular maps, and blood characteristic maps product very realistic skin. Can you tell the difference between real skin and the pixie's? Check out screenshots from the NVIDIA Dawn demo here.

VERTEX SHADERS 2.0+
With the CineFX engine, vertex-processing capabilities are greatly expanded while programming complexity is greatly reduced, giving game developers the power to achieve any effect imaginable. Fully generalized loops and branches can be data-dependent, giving the CineFX engine a much more straightforward programming methodology than previous architectures. One shader can be written to encompass all the skinning methods and operations, and since the shader can branch on a per-vertex basis, it is not required to break up the model. With these advances, the CineFX engine shatters previous vertex shading limitations.

PIXEL SHADERS 2.0+
The NVIDIA CineFX engine raises pixel shading to a first-class programmable citizen of the graphics pipeline, and gives developers a host of new capabilities for controlling pixels and producing effects that are only limited by the imagination.

Advanced CineFX engine features include the support of 1024 instructions in a single rendering pass, allowing for complex effects that aren’t practical in any other architectures. For example, volumetric effects such as smoke, fur, fire and grass add significant depth and realism to a scene, but require multiple instructions to achieve. What CineFX achieves in one rendering pass takes competing products many more. Procedural texture support obviates the need for spending video memory on large texture maps, and allows for subtle, realistic differences across surfaces. Complex lighting can dramatically improve the realism of images, but traditionally adds to rendering time. With the GeForce FX all of these gorgeous enhancements are possible without sacrificing performance.

In addition, shaders can now handle multiple textures in one pass for optimized execution, making layered or mixed effects such as paint peeling off a metallic surface possible. The CineFX engine allows fetching from up to 16 unique texture maps in a single pixel shader program. These textures can be anything that defines surface or subsurface properties such as bump maps, displacement maps, gloss/specular maps, environment maps, shadow maps and albedo maps.

By taking advantage of the CineFX engine, programmers gain increased levels of precision with true 128-bit color, the ability to write longer shader programs incorporating more effects, dynamic branching and looping for greatly enhanced control flow, and a shorter shader development cycle using the Cg graphics language. All of this translates into game environments and characters that teeter on the very brink of realism—delivering more powerfully immersive real-time experiences for you, the enthusiast.

	NVIDIA GeForceTM FX Key Features The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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High-Precision Graphics

Avid gamers demand the most immersive, insanely realistic gaming experience possible. Only the NVIDIA® GeForce FX GPU goes beyond the polygon-pushing rhetoric and improves the quality of each and every pixel, packing a double-edged cinematic sword that puts even its closest competitors to shame. By combining the incredible dynamic range of today's state-of-the-art 3D motion pictures with the finely tuned studio-quality precision of the industry's sole fully 128-bit graphics pipeline, the GeForce FX brings you the most intense cinematic visions available. All with the full-on maximum frame-rate horsepower you've come to expect from NVIDIA.

When we say "cinematic," we don't mean washed-up Hollywood has-beens waving weapons around against a bad blue screen in some hastily-produced FMV. We're talking fully realized 3D characters conjured before you in real time, lovingly crafted by the world's premiere interactive artists. It's no coincidence that the NVIDIA GeForce is their preferred platform—and once you see the new generation GPU in action, you won't accept anything less.

The real world is filled with dramatic contrasts between lights, shadows and colors, from the brightest, harshest white to the deepest, darkest black. For any game world to convincingly depict a 3D environment, it needs to simulate this seemingly infinite range in a decidedly finite space. With each added "bit" of light or color information afforded a game, the quality and accuracy of the resulting image grow exponentially. 32-bit color only gives each of the red, green, blue and alpha channels 256 choices. 128-bit color provides the developer with literally millions of choices for each channel. For film-quality real-time animated visuals, there's simply no substitute. The GeForce FX delivers this demanding level of excellence in real time.

Each and every pixel drawn to your screen goes through many intense mathematical computations to determine its color and brightness. Other chips fail to maintain a full 128 bits of detailed information throughout the graphics pipeline; as a result, "rounding errors" result. This can—and does—result in positive values when a negative is correct, or a zero when a very small value is called for. By the time the multitude of calculations is performed and the image displayed on your screen, these errors accumulate to the point where not only is the resulting image unconvincing, it's downright disappointing.

Put simply, lack of precision is what causes lackluster picture quality in even the most professionally produced games. All the affecting beauty of the Grand Canyon is lost if seen through filthy, scratched sunglasses, and even the best games suffer a similar fate when forced through hardware that tolerates mistakes in its most basic operations. Without sufficient data, bump maps, created to bring more realism to the surface of 3D objects, develop moiré patterns, destroying the illusion. Rippling water, intended to reflect and refract the game environment, develops distracting and unnatural "checkering" eyesores. With the GeForce FX, there's no need to tolerate these blemishes.

	NVIDIA GeForceTM FX Key Features The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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Intellisample Technology

NVIDIA's earth-shaking next-generation GPU takes image quality to new stratospheric heights, and sports enough juice to keep that eye-candy flowing without so much as a hiccup. Whether you're dying for the next wave of state-of-the-art digital entertainment, or just want a killer makeover for your current favorites, the NVIDIA® GeForce FX GPU's sheer superiority gives psychotic graphics a direct line to your visual cortex.

Antialiasing is the key to smoothing out rough edges, or "jaggies," that often appear on the edges of 3D geometry. The Intellisample technology's intelligent antialiasing captures a higher-resolution version of each image, then resizes and resamples it for output to your screen, smoothing away imperfections. The GeForce FX's new 6XS mode delivers silky-smooth visuals not seen in the current 4X or 4XS modes, calculating 50% more samples. This feature is available through the control panel, so even current games can take advantage of this stunning new level of clarity.

The Intellisample process also uses gamma-adjusted sampling, taking into account the dramatic physical differences between how your eyes and monitor perceive light and color, making for much smoother and more natural edge transitions.

What's more, the GeForce FX's innovative new architecture includes an advanced and completely transparent form of lossless depth Z-buffer and color compression technology. The result? Essentially all modes of antialiasing are available at all resolutions without any performance hit. Greatly improved image quality, with no drop in frame rate!

Intellisample also incorporates the most advanced anisotropic filtering available. When a textured surface is close to edge-on with your viewpoint, the detail and accuracy of that texture drops drastically. NVIDIA's proprietary anisotropic filtering eliminates this distortion adaptively by determining how extensive distortion is likely to be, and applying its filtering muscle proportionally, so you get every last drop of quality and performance possible.

The GeForce FX inspires and fosters new levels of creativity in developers, and raises the realism of the digital experience for all users. For the first time, developers can give users exactly what they want—games with characters, special effects and animation that match those of the film world. It's a brave new world: don't face it with anything less than the best.

	NVIDIA GeForceTM FX Technical Briefs The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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Technical Brief: NVIDIA GeForce FX GPU
The latest generation of NVIDIA® GeForce™ graphics processing units (GPUs), the NVIDIA GeForce FX GPUs, ushers in a new age of cinematic visual effects on the desktop.

Technical Brief: NVIDIA CineFX Shaders
The latest generation of NVIDIA® graphics processing units (GPUs) ushers in a new age of cinematic visual effects.

High-Precision Graphics Tech Brief
GeForce FX GPUs deliver studio-quality on the desktop PC. Take a look at the inner-workings of the technologies driving this revolutionary advancement in the attached technical brief (4.9MB PDF).

NVIDIA GeForce FX GPUs and Microsoft’s DirectX 9.0 API Tech Brief
Get an in-depth look at how the GeForce FX GPUs take advantage of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 API in the attached technical brief (2.6MB PDF).

Technical Brief: Digital Vibrance Control
Today, people spend more time than ever in front of a computer display, and as a result, platforms must deliver the highest-quality visual experience while minimizing eyestrain.

Technical Brief: Intellisample Technology
In 2002, several key technological revolutions came together to produce the biggest leap forward in graphics since the advent of dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs).

AGP 8X Technical Brief
This technical brief details the benefits of the latest AGP 3.0 enhancements and NVIDIA's plans for its adoption. (2.24MB PDF)

nView Multi-display Technology Tech Brief
Read about the cutting-edge combination of hardware and software features of NVIDIA's revolutionary nView multi-display technology in the attached technical brief (250KB PDF).

	NVIDIA GeForceTM FX Image Samples The Dawn of Cinematic Computing
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Everything is packed inside this powerhouse of a processor, including the latest high-speed DDR2 memory, an expansive AGP 8X pipeline and unparalleled IntellisampleTM technology—driving scenes of unrivalled beauty at unmatched speeds. See for yourself how features of GeForce FX will radically change your expectations for 3D on your PC.

Demo: Dawn
Welcome to our enchanted forest – a place where virtual meets reality.

Demo: Ogre
This "Dancing Ogre" is a real-time rendition of a movie originally created by Spellcraft Studios titled "Yeah! the movie".

Demo: Time Machine
Gaze through a portal at the passage of time as this 1950's era pickup truck shows the ill effects of decades of neglect.

Demo: Toys
Enter a world of imagination as two young boys stage their own "War of the Worlds" with props from their toy box.