GeForce FX Series - Overview

Overview

NVIDIA's GeForce FX series is the fifth generation of the GeForce line. With GeForce 3, NVIDIA introduced programmable shader functionality into their 3D architecture, in line with the release of Microsoft's DirectX 8.0. The GeForce 4 Ti was an enhancement of the GeForce 3 technology. With real-time 3D graphics technology continually advancing, the release of DirectX 9.0 brought further refinement of programmable pipeline technology with the arrival of Shader Model 2.0. The GeForce FX series is NVIDIA's first generation Direct3D 9-compliant hardware.

The series was manufactured on TSMC's 130 nm fabrication process. It is Shader Model 2.0/2.0A compliant, allowing for more flexibility in complex shader/fragment programs and much higher arithmetic precision. It supports a number of new memory technologies, including DDR2, GDDR-2 and GDDR-3 and saw NVIDIA's first implementation of a memory data bus wider than 128-bit. The anisotropic filtering implementation has potentially higher quality than previous NVIDIA designs. Anti-aliasing methods have been enhanced and additional modes are available compared to GeForce 4. Memory bandwidth and fill-rate optimization mechanisms have been improved. Some members of the series offer double fill-rate in z-buffer/stencil-only passes.

The series also brought improvements to NVIDIA's video processing hardware, in the form of the Video Processing Engine (VPE), which was first deployed in the GeForce 4 MX. The primary addition, compared to previous NVIDIA video processors, was per-pixel video-deinterlacing.

The initial version of the GeForce FX (the 5800) was one of the first cards to come equipped with a large dual-slot cooling solution. Called "Flow FX", the cooler was very large in comparison to ATI's small, single-slot cooler on the 9700 series. It was jokingly referred to as the 'Dustbuster', due to a high level of fan noise.

The advertising campaign for the GeForce FX featured the Dawn technology demo, which was the work of several veterans from the computer animation Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. NVIDIA touted it as "The Dawn of Cinematic Computing", while critics noted that this was the strongest case of using sex appeal in order to sell graphics cards yet.

NVIDIA debuted a new campaign to motivate developers to optimize their titles for NVIDIA hardware at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in 2002. In exchange for prominently displaying the NVIDIA logo on the outside of the game packaging, NVIDIA offered free access to a state of the art test lab in Eastern Europe, that tested against 500 different PC configurations for compatibility. Developers also had extensive access to NVIDIA engineers, who helped produce code optimized for NVIDIA products.

Hardware based on the NV30 project didn't launch until near the end of 2002, several months after ATI had released their competing DirectX 9 architecture.