GeForce2 GTS Chipset Technology

It may help if we discuss the new technology incorporated within the NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS, to establish whether the changes are relevant to your PC environment.

A brief synopsis of the terms will do no harm either:

GPU	=	Graphics Processing Unit
GeForce2 GTS	=	Giga Texel Shader
Texel	=	Texture + Pixel
NSR	=	NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer
T&L	=	Transform and Lighting

The .18 Micron process

GeForce2 GTS is manufactured using .18-micron technology; this is a reduction from the original .22-micron core used in the previous GeForce. A reduction in the manufacturing core leads to smaller die sizes, and thus reducing production cost, lower power consumption, which in turn reduces the heat generated by the GPU and a reduction in power consumption, although the current GeForce2 GTS does retain the same heat sink as it's predecessor. The new .18-micron die also runs at 200MHz clock, which is a significant increase over the 120MHz of the GeForce, and is a key factor for the GeForce2 Gas's superior performance. NVIDIA has also increased the number of transistors, to enable the additional features build into the GeForce2, which we will see later in our review.

Memory Bandwidth

An increase in memory bandwidth from 300MHz DDR (150MHz) to 333MHz DDR (166MHz) is not so great in comparison to the other changes, but this is mainly because there is no faster memory currently around. This problem is not exclusive to NVIDIA; other manufactures using the same technology will experience similar bottlenecks.

Mega to Giga the NVIDIA way

Explaining this technology can not only get complicated but also mind boggling, to keep your focus we shall endeavour to keep this part simple.

The term Texel is derived from texture-pixels that can be applied in the rendering process. You may recall the GeForce256 came equipped with four parallel rendering pipelines. Each one of these pipelines could handle one Texel each, and had a fill rate of 480 MTexels/s. The formula is simple, the GeForce256 with its 4 pipelines x clocked at 120MHz x and one Texel per pipeline = 480 MTexels/s.

Enter the GeForce2 GTS - 200Mhz Clock - 4 pipelines and the a new term 'Hyper Texel Pipeline' allowing TWO texels per pixel in each of its four pipelines, apply the formula and the magic figure 1600 Mtexels/s (1.6Gtexels/s) appears. One has to congratulate NVIDIA for being the first 3D Manufacturer to reach the Giga stage.

NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR)

NVIDIA's GeForce2 GTS - GPU is the first product of it's kind to provide hardware support for real-time per-pixel operations, and incorporates the new NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer. Additional features are Per-Pixel Bump-Mapping, Per-Pixel Diffuse Lighting and Per-Pexel Spectacular Lighting.

The Transform & Lighting Engine (T&L)

The engine in the original GeForce256 could calculate 15 Million triangles/sec compared to the GeForce2 GTS, which due to the increase in clock speed to 200Mhz can calculate 25 Million triangles/sec. Certainly seen as an improvement. NVIDIA were the first company to introduce an integrated T&L engine.

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