Creative Graphics Blaster GeForce

Graphics Blaster from GeForce

holds the world’s first GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)–the GeForce 256. In

traditional 3D cards, only some of the 3D functions like rendering, triangle setup, and

clipping are handled by the 3D accelerator. Functions such as lighting and transformation

that are quite common in most 3D games today are left for the CPU handle.

The GeForce rids the CPU of this burden and

includes these functions in its 3D pipeline. The GPU has a separate pipeline for handling

each of these functions. So now the CPU is left with handling the artificial intelligence

and physics part of the calculations. In addition it can render up to 15 million

triangles, and 480-million pixels per second. The end result is a richer-and-detailed 3D

world in your games, and better speed.

The card has a 350 MHz RAMDAC and 32 MB of

SDRAM that allows a resolution of up to 2048x1536 at a refresh rate of 75 Hz. It supports

all the features in DirectX 7 and OpenGL. It also supports AGP 4x with a new Fast Write

feature that lets the CPU send data directly to the GPU through your

  motherboard’s chipset instead of sending through the system memory. This is

supposed to give a tremendous boost in performance.

The GeForce will support a lot of upcoming 3D

games including Quake 3, Evolva Scout, etc. The card is not yet available in India, and

has an estimated street price of $249.99. For details go to style="font-family: Arial">www.creative.com.