That AA Type Thing -

No we are not talking about some new electronic anti-drinking deal, this is AntiAliasing.  More specifically HRAA ( High Resolution AntiAliasing ). What this does in short is super sample your 3D environment  in order to remove the stair stepping artifacts you may get on  the edges of polygons.    Here is an example:

All these shots were taken in Tribes 2 at 640x480

There you can see the culprit. Its hard to make your brain think the environment is real if it sees "Jaggies" all over the place.  Its more an issue at lower resolutions then higher ones.  at 1280x1024 you do not need AA most of the time as it is able to do such a good job on its own. AA is just a more elegant way of doing it under a lower res.

At 2x AA you can see a big improvement making the edges much less "Jaggie" but as you could see in the last page it comes at a price. You loose a good bit of performance.

This is Nvidia's baby, called Quincunx AA. Instead of doing typical Super sampling  ( rendering the screen at 1600x1200 in hardware and then bringing it back down to your screen Res) This actually does some very intelligent work, which is a departure from the brute force type AA that the others do.

The Quality of the AA is not exactly as good as 4xAA but its coming at a MUCH less performance hit.   How this happened is summed up best by the Nv Tech slides they have on how this HRAA actually works.

There all nice and clear now eh? :)

Image Quality -

The Pixel Shader abilities in the GeForce3's T&L Engine really offers a  great looking and very realistic enviroment.  It also offers Environmental Bump Mapping.  This was a feature first brought to light by Matrox almost 2 years ago.  While pick up and use of this technology hasn't been as quick as Matrox would have liked, now that Nv is using it I am betting support will jump.  Combined with those and the very efficient core design and functionality the industry is rapidly approaching the ability to make a real time virtual world. This is the holy grail of 3D, Making an environment that in real time, can mimic and produce real life quality. 

We are still far from it, but are getting there fast, to see what I mean Please check out the Nature Bench shots from below taken out of 3DMark 2001, they are stunning.

Click on the above Images to see the incredible quality this card is capable of.  These are 1024x768 big and are 200K big.

Conclusions

So, after all this, now a conclusion.  At a price tag of 500 - 600$  it really makes it hard to look at this from the view of a general person in the market for a video card would even consider this one.  So I am looking at this from the view of a hard core geek:

UPDATE: The going retail for the card in some places has slipped to below 400$!! That makes it much more reasonable for just a game'n kid who wants to upgrade to the best out there. I still don't think its worth it if you have a GF2 Ultra, but if you are running anything slower, then I can see it being a good buy.

Its Fast, VERY fast. Unfortunately it needs some well optimized Dx8 software to use it to its full potential. I personally think OpenGL 1.2 apps will run better on it for now then anything else.   Would I recommend this for gaming geek? Depends.   It comes down to this, if you already run a GeForce 2 Ultra or Pro video card, stick with it for a bit longer.  There is NOTHING out they requires a GeForce 3 or for that mater a GeForce 2 Ultra. If you are looking to buy a card to upgrade from a lil Trident 1mb PCI, well I also think unless you have a real good reason or are willing to burn some money, Go for a GeForce 2 Ultra.  The reason I say this is simple, As apps are brought out to support this incredible card, you will see the price fall for it. So in 2 or 3 months you will be able to buy the card for possibly 100 - 200$ cheaper, and have some games that use it out.

If you are looking for the peak of technology, and will accept nothing but the best, then you need this card.  The GeForce 3 and more inparticular, this VisionTek GeForce 3 is an incredible piece of hardware and will provide many months of comfort knowing you have the fastest thing around.  There is much more performance hidden in this card, I am sure of it.  We are still using NED's ( Experimental Dets) drivers and I am sure Nvidia is working very hard to get the release drivers not only WHQL Certified, but also pull some more performance from them.

On a side note,  I ran Tribes 2 at 1280x1024 with QCAA,  with all the details at the highest they can go, Under Open GL 1.2, and was getting 30 Fps still. Simply Amazing.

Pros & Cons:

Pros-
Blistering Performance under certain API's, and certain OS's
A next generation of card that will act as a benchmark for others to come
NED Drivers are stable and robust, once DETS are out it will be even better
EXCELLENT Over clocking!
VisionTek offers some excellent customer support.
 

Cons-
Price is Excessive at best
Games and Applications that are optimized for the GPU are limited
With no Optimization in the app a lesser priced GeForce2 will perform as well as the GeForce3
Wimpy GPU cooler

 

Big Props goes out to VisionTek for sending off a Retail board so fast. This is no Loaner board, so you will see it used in many more ProCooling Projects!

If you want to verify my results or search and graph for your self here is the Spread Sheet ( Excel 2000) that I recorded all the data from the tests in there.

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