NVIDIA's GeForce FX
A Pre-Production Showcase

By - Dave Atlavilla
January 27, 2003

Next we'll give you an in depth tour of the new GeForce FX's driver panels and some of the new features of the GeForce FX.

Software Drivers and Settings NVIDIA Detonator Drivers For The GFFX

The GeForce FX "Information Tab", provides the usual board and driver revision detail.  It also gives users access to the advanced features settings of the card. "Desktop Utilities" allows users quick access to commonly used settings including, the AA, OpenGL, Direct3D and "NVRotate" options.  The "Desktop Effects" tab is under NVIDIA's "NView" feature panel and allows for some nice customizable desktop settings, like Window Color Keying and Transparent Drag.  There are also the usual Gamma, Hue and "Digital Vibrance" settings, as we've seen in previous releases, in addition to Video Overlay control of Gamma, Hue etc.  What is somewhat new to the drivers is "NV Rotate", which allows Flat Panel users the ability to rotate their display image by 90, 180 or 270 degrees.  This is a useful tool for some Desktop Publishing applications.

Image Quality Settings:

The Direct 3D and OpenGL control tabs are unchanged with the GeForce FX.  The Image Quality, Anti-Aliasing and Performance tab has been reworked a bit  and it is very clean, or some folks would say "minimalistic", versus a Radeon 9700/9500's settings in this area.  However, there is a fair amount of configurability in the new GeForce FX's image quality settings.  The Performance Slider has "Application", "Balanced" and "Aggressive" settings.  This controls the level of adaptive texture or anisotropic filtering, that the GFFX applies to the game you are playing.  "Application" allows the game engine to set the level.  "Balanced" is, as one would expect, a happy medium and "Aggressive" is the setting to use for the highest frame rate, regardless of image quality.

Users can also adjust the amount of Aniso Filtering and AA manually, with the other two sliders in this panel.  8X Ansio Filtering is the max setting but there is also a "Texture Sharpening" radio button, which we need to get some time in the lab with, to draw any conclusions on its functionality.  AA settings of 2X, Quincunx, 4X, 4XS, 6XS, and 8XS are available now as well.  OpenGL based game engines can only take advantage of up to 4X AA on the GeForce FX but Direct 3D games will run all the way up to 8XS mode.  6XS and 8XS modes use a "skewed grid" AA sampling algorithm, like 4XS has in the past, but use 6 and 8 samples per pixel respectively.  The "skewed grid" method of AA sampling supposedly doesn't blur textures as much as traditional AA.

Refresh Rates, Clock Speeds and Health Monitoring:

The D3D Refresh Rate Lock tab is a welcomed additional setting for sure, with the ability to lock in your full screen D3D Game setting's refresh rate, when you switch through various in game resolutions.  The "Clock Settings" tab is fairly standard issue for NVIDIA product but notice those nice high clock speeds that are available now.  Finally, NVIDIA added the ability to monitor your card's Core GPU temperature and invoke a "slowdown threshold" temperature, should it exceed the setting you specify.  Again, NVIDIA has brought forth a wealth of useful tools to go along with their new flagship product.

To Be Continued...

We know what you are thinking and we couldn't agree more with you.  It certainly is a bit anti-climactic to not have a full thorough round of benchmarks to go with our GeForce FX showcase.  Unfortunately, with GeForce FX cards still in very short supply, we are still waiting for an evaluation unit to arrive for testing.  The fact of the matter is, you'll probably see only a couple of reviews on line today, with only a couple of the largest PC Hardware Analysis sites having tested cards first hand.  We're certainly not happy about the fact that we have to provide you with yet another "preview" of the GeForce FX, rather than actual testing.  However, with all the trials and tribulations that NVIDIA has had with the GeForce FX launch, we're not surprised at the situation.  We've been assured by our NVIDIA contacts, that we will have hardware in our hands very soon.  At that time, we'll come back to this article and complete our full performance analysis of the GeForce FX, versus a Radeon 9700 Pro, Radeon 9500 and GeForce 4 Ti 4600 card.  Please bear with us and stay tuned in the days ahead for our completed testing results.

Thanks!
Dave Altavilla
 

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