GeForce 3 series

Lore & Background

The GeForce 3 was unveiled during the 2001 Macworld Conference & Expo/Tokyo 2001 in Makuhari Messe and powered realtime demos of Pixar's Junior Lamp and id Software's Doom 3. Apple would later announce launch rights for its new line of computers. The GeForce 3 family comprises three consumer models: the GeForce 3, the GeForce 3 Ti200, and the GeForce 3 Ti500. A separate professional version, with a feature-set tailored for computer aided design, was sold as the Quadro DCC. A derivative of the GeForce 3, known as the NV2A, is used in the Microsoft Xbox game console; it is clocked the same as the original GeForce 3 but features an additional vertex shader, providing performance equivalent to that of the GeForce 4 Ti.

The GeForce 3 was introduced three months after Nvidia acquired the assets of 3dfx. Its programmable shader architecture enabled applications to execute custom visual effects programs in Microsoft Shader language 1.1. It is believed that the fixed-function T&L hardware from GeForce 2 was still included on the chip for use with Direct3D 7.0 applications, as the single vertex shader was not fast enough to emulate it yet. The GeForce 3 has four pixel pipelines which each can sample two textures per clock, the same configuration as GeForce 2 excluding the slower GeForce 2 MX line. The memory subsystem, dubbed Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA), reduces overdraw, conserves memory bandwidth by compressing the z-buffer and better manages interaction with the DRAM. Other architectural changes include EMBM support and improvements to anti-aliasing functionality, adding multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) and Quincunx anti-aliasing methods. The texture sampling units were upgraded to support 8-tap anisotropic filtering, compared to the previous limit of 2-tap with GeForce 2.

Nvidia refreshed the lineup in October 2001 with the release of the GeForce 3 Ti200 and Ti500, coinciding with ATI's releases of the Radeon 7500 and Radeon 8500. The Ti500 has higher core and memory clocks (240 MHz core/250 MHz RAM) than the original GeForce 3 (200 MHz/230 MHz), and generally matches the Radeon 8500 in performance. The Ti200 is clocked lower (175 MHz/200 MHz) making it the lowest-priced GeForce 3 release, but it still surpasses the Radeon 7500 in speed and feature set although lacking dual-monitor implementation. The original GeForce 3 and Ti500 were only released in 64 MiB configurations, while the Ti200 was also released as 128 MiB versions.

Reader's Guide

The GeForce 3 series marked a pivotal shift in GPU design by introducing programmable pixel and vertex shaders, enabling developers to create custom visual effects beyond fixed-function pipelines. This made it the first Direct3D 8.0 compliant card and laid the groundwork for future shader-based graphics. Its Lightspeed Memory Architecture improved memory bandwidth efficiency through z-buffer compression and overdraw reduction, while the addition of MSAA and Quincunx anti-aliasing offered better performance than the super-sampling methods used by previous GeForce chips. However, the GeForce 3's theoretical pixel and texel throughput per clock matched the GeForce 2, and in Direct3D 7 T&L benchmarks the GeForce 2 Ultra could outperform the GeForce 3 and Ti200 due to lower clock speeds on the newer cards. The Ti500 generally matched the Radeon 8500 in performance, while the Ti200 occupied a lower price point. The GeForce 4 Ti, introduced in April 2002, was a revision of the GeForce 3 architecture with higher speeds and improved features, eventually replacing the Ti500. The Ti200 remained in production for a short while, occupying a niche between the GeForce 4 Ti4200 and GeForce 4 MX460, but was discontinued by summer 2002 due to naming confusion with the GeForce 4 MX and Ti lines. Nvidia ceased driver support for the GeForce 3 series; the final Windows 9x/Me driver was 81.98 (December 21, 2005), the final Windows 2000/XP driver was 93.71 (November 2, 2006), and the final Linux 32-bit driver was 96.43.23 (September 14, 2012).

Did You Know?

• The GeForce 3 was the first Microsoft Direct3D 8.0 compliant 3D-card.
• A derivative of the GeForce 3, the NV2A, is used in the Microsoft Xbox game console and features an additional vertex shader.
• The GeForce 3 Ti200 was also released in 128 MiB versions, while the original GeForce 3 and Ti500 were only available in 64 MiB configurations.
• The GeForce 3's texture sampling units support 8-tap anisotropic filtering, up from 2-tap on the GeForce 2.