Nvidia GeForce3 Ti 500 Preview (Page 3/6) Posted: October 1, 2001
Written by: Dan "Tweak Monkey" Kennedy Features of the GeForce3 Ti500 The specifications of the chip indicate that it would not be much faster than a GeForce3 -- we'll see what benchmarks show...

Specifications:

• Estimated Retail Price: $349 *
• 240 MHz core clock ** (vs. 200 MHz of GeForce3)
• 500 MHz memory (250 MHz DDR. vs 233 MHz DDR of the GeForce3)
• 350 MHz RAMDAC***
• 4 pixels/clock / 960M pixels/sec fill rate
• Enhanced .15 micron(µ) Process
• 57 million transistors (GF3: 57 million; GF2: 25 million)
• 960 billion operations/sec (vs. 800 of GeForce3)
• 16 AA samples/clock; 3.8 billion AA pixels/sec
• Programmable vertex and pixel shading processors
• Fully DX8 compliant
• Lightspeed Memory Architecture
• Patented crossbar memory controller
• Only renders visible pixels (built-in "HSR")
• Compresses data rendering
• 4:1 compression
• Lossless
• Optimizes b/w by compressing data on chip
• Up to 4x the efficiency of the GeForce 2 memory architecture
• 64 MB DDR SDRAM

* - Our best guess of initial pricing, though it will likely drop to ~$250 in six months or so.
** - Although Nvidia never unveiled clock speed, given the processing power, the conversion to obtain the speed specified would require a 240 MHz core clock.
*** - We could not find any listing of the RAMDAC, so we assume it's the same 350 MHz module used in the GeForce3.

New Features of the nfiniteFX Engine:

From our GeForce3 Preview, you should already know the features offered by the nfiniteFX Engine, so I am not going to list them here. However, Nvidia lists a couple new features of the nfiniteFX engine in their latest whitepapers. Namely, Shadow Buffers and 3D Textures. Next Page