Graphic Cards Nvidia snaffles (grabs) ATI's 3Dc idea

deejay

Explorer
IT Turns out that Nvidia recognised ATI's 3Dc marchitecture as a good thing and decided that it wants to go down the same road.
In this phoney war between Nvidia and ATI the one tends to follow the other - just in case.
3Dc is a new compression marchitecture meant to increase the level of details in games. All ATI cards from X800 generation upwards have this capability and it turns out that new Nvidia cards are going to use it as well.
We believe the upcoming G70 has this support already, as it's taped out. It is the first compression technique optimised to use normal maps, allowing per pixel control over light reflection from a textured surface. In other words, it can look very good.
It's possible to use 4:1 compression which can lead you to four times more details without necessarily having four times the graphics memory. It won't affect your performance as, well, it's sort of free.
In a best-case scenario, if you have a 256MB card you should be able to use up to 1024MB of textures and this should increase the quality of your game tremendously.
3Dc is an open standard so Nvidia doesn't need ATI's blessing to use it. We understand that game developers were asking for 3Dc in Nvidian hardware and now they will get it.
Source: Theinquirer
p.s.

snaffle = to take something quickly for yourself, in a way that prevents someone else from having or using it.
 
Thats gr8 news.

Thanks deejay.

When is this upcoming G70 supposed t obe hitting the market.

What sort of a cost will these 3Dc based Nvida cards have and will these
cards have the Sli Bridge to add more to the fun.
 
Heh old news. The 3Dc texture format was supported in nvidia betas since 71.20 in directx for the geforce 6 series. Strangely enuf, the support is disabled in the official drivers. However there is no performance increase using 3Dc as compared to DXT5 unlike ATI. That humus 3Dc demo worked perfectly on GF6 series cards.
 
Back
Top