GForce 4 Next Gen ?

It's definately not an overclocked GF3 which is what the original poster was claiming. The fact is, it has two CRT output certains (dual monitor), two vertex shaders (another functional unit on the silicon), and a whole host of improvements to the memory and AA subsystem such that is it able to *double* the performance of the GF3 Ti500 at hi-res AA with only a marginal clock rate and memory bandwidth improvement.

Even the GF2 wasn't an overclocked GF1. Featurewise, the cards are the same, but the GF2 added multitexturing pipelines.

GF3Ti was an overclocked GF3. The "ultra" versions of NVidias chips were overclocks. But the GF4 is clearly a revision to the silicon itself that required testing, debugging, respin, etc.

I can't see why someone who already owns a Radeon8500 would upgrade to a 128mb version. What's the point? The 8500 does very well against the GF3, but I doubt another 64mb will make any big difference. The GF4 4200/4400 actually puts its extra 64mb of RAM to good use for high resolution (1280x1024 or 1600x1200) FSAA which in many game engines runs at usable framerates. (at 1600x1200, the back buffer and Z buffer will eat 30+mb in 2X and 60+mb in 4x) The 8500, even with 128mb memory, won't be able to do 1280x1024 or 1600x1200 FSAA with any reasonable performance due to the lack of multisampling.

Oh well, we'll wait to see the 128mb 8500 overclock benchmarks, but I doubt it will make that big a difference.

 

AFAIK, all they did was split off the TCU’s. GF256’s TCU’s were trilinear capable; GF2 were dual bilinear.

 

Regardless, anytime you change the silicon, you've got a much different situation than speed-binning or rebranding. Sure, making a few minor changes might seem easy (although the move to a smaller manufacturing process was a biggie), but it costs way more than simply binning.

If we're going to use the original poster's criteria, than NVidia hasn't done anything truly new since the GF1 (added GPU, and the rasterizer hasn't change much since the TNT), and every 3dfx product ever released was nothing more than a Voodoo1. You can see the gradual, conservative evolution of both of those lines of hardware. Just look at the registers and block diagrams of the chips!

 

>>I wonder how much Intel paid for that revision?<<

Seeing that Moore cofounded Intel, I doubt they had to pay him much...

 

Talking about next gen...

Have you guys seen the Codecult - Codecreatures Engine video?

www.codecult.com

Sort of takes the 3DMark 2001 Nature demo to the next level.
You have to click your way to the java applet first then to the download/videos section.

It's a 33.3MB MPG file.