Graphics chip launches are dramatic affairs, particularly when Nvidia is the center of attention. Every new generation of chips represents a significant jump in how well graphics cards run current games and has some whiz-bang features that promise to bring 3D game visuals closer to photo-realism. A quick look at the quality of modern PC games' visuals is proof enough that better hardware does, in time, make for better games. Even though ATI has become a credible threat to Nvidia's perceived dominance, those hoping that Nvidia's newest chip--long known by its code name, NV30--will be the next big thing shouldn't be disappointed. But let the bad news be known up front: This is a paper launch, and graphics cards based on NV30 won't be in stores until next February.

Since acquiring 3dfx's assets and conclusively closing the early chapter of competition in the consumer graphics industry, Nvidia has publicly maintained that the first product with 3dfx technology would be the NV30. 3dfx fans who've remained curious about the fallen graphics star's unreleased chips might see a glimmer in the inner workings of the new Nvidia chip. The 3dfx engineers Nvidia hired on added ideas from chips planned to come after 3dfx's never-released Rampage. Unfortunately, Nvidia representatives declined to explain which specific features of the new chip were the result of that collaboration.

The obvious mark of the 3dfx influence is intentionally so. The new chip's name is GeForce FX, which is intended to hint at both the 3dfx link and the card's major feature: the extension of DirectX 9 programmable effects to allow for more cinematic visuals. Though, don't be surprised to see the name get even longer, as conventional suffixes like "Pro" and "Ultra" will likely be tacked on to the GeForce FX name when specific products are announced.

One look at the card and you know it's hot--this copper contraption combines a heat sink, fan, and heat spreader, and pulls in air from outside the case.

Just as the game industry often bandies about comparisons between its revenue and Hollywood's, graphics companies like to compare their hardware with the technology used by companies like Pixar and DreamWorks to make CG feature movies. This time the comparison actually makes a little sense, in part because professional cards based on the chip are likely to make it into Hollywood animators' workstations to let them preview their work in real time. Long before DirectX 8 made shaders--programmable pixel and vertex effects--a possibility in games, they were being used in movies. With Nvidia's extension of the DirectX 9 standard, the GeForce FX removes many of the arbitrary limits on how long programmable shaders can be, making them more like what's used in Hollywood. David Kirk, Nvidia's chief technology officer, has even said that it would be possible to use the GeForce FX to render Hollywood animation instead of render farms, as the chip can write the processed data back over the AGP bus to the hard drive.

Dawn is a delicate wood nymph, created by animators from the Square movie, that demos some very human-like animation.

While it's probably tough for any bystander to see what real effect such details will have, what's evident is that the GeForce FX beats ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro in the specs related to processing shaders. The GeForce FX allows for vertex shaders that are some 65,000 instructions long, compared with the 1,024 allowed for by the Radeon 9700 Pro, and a single vertex program can have 256 loops instead of four. Nvidia points out that extremely long, looping vertex shaders can be used to create things like a water effect in which a character runs his hand over the surface of a pond and ripples are calculated for each finger, since the shader can loop back and add more polygon detail close to the action without bogging down in the rest of the scene. A similar level of added complexity comes with the GeForce FX pixel shader technology, which is dubbed Pixel Shader 2.0+ because it significantly exceeds the DirectX 9 standard, allowing for pixel shaders with more advanced, conditional operations that now have a limit of not 32 or 64 instructions, but rather 1,024.

Tech demos are always the first place we see such features in action, and Nvidia doesn't disappoint. Read on to find out what the GeForce FX is capable of.