The GeForce 3 was introduced three months after Nvidia acquired the assets of
3dfx. It was marketed as the
nFinite FX Engine, and was the first
Microsoft Direct3D 8.0 compliant 3D-card. Its programmable shader architecture enabled applications to execute custom visual effects programs in Microsoft
Shader language 1.1. It is believed that the fixed-function T&L hardware from GeForce 2 was still included on the chip for use with Direct3D 7.0 applications, as the single vertex shader was not fast enough to emulate it yet. With respect to pure pixel and texel throughput, the GeForce 3 has four pixel pipelines which each can sample two textures per clock. This is the same configuration as GeForce 2, excluding the slower GeForce 2 MX line. To take better advantage of available memory performance, the GeForce 3 has a memory subsystem dubbed
Lightspeed Memory Architecture (LMA). This is composed of several mechanisms that reduce overdraw, conserve memory bandwidth by compressing the
z-buffer (depth buffer) and better manage interaction with the DRAM. Other architectural changes include EMBM support (first introduced by Matrox in 1999) and improvements to
anti-aliasing functionality. Previous GeForce chips could perform only super-sampled anti-aliasing (SSAA), a demanding process that renders the image at a large size internally and then scales it down to the end output resolution. GeForce 3 adds multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA) and
Quincunx anti-aliasing methods, both of which perform significantly better than super-sampling anti-aliasing at the expense of quality. With multi-sampling, the render output units super-sample only the
Z-buffers and
stencil buffers, and using that information get greater geometry detail needed to determine if a pixel covers more than one polygonal object. This saves the pixel/fragment shader from having to render multiple fragments for pixels where the same object covers all of the same sub-pixels in a pixel. This method fails with texture maps which have varying transparency (e.g. a texture map that represents a chain link fence). Quincunx anti-aliasing is a blur filter that shifts the rendered image a half-pixel up and a half-pixel left in order to create sub-pixels which are then averaged together in a diagonal cross pattern, destroying both jagged edges but also some overall image detail. Finally, the GeForce 3's
texture sampling units were upgraded to support 8-tap
anisotropic filtering, compared to the previous limit of 2-tap with GeForce 2. With 8-tap anisotropic filtering enabled, distant textures can be noticeably sharper. A derivative of the GeForce 3, known as the NV2A, is used in the Microsoft
Xbox game console. It is clocked the same as the original GeForce 3 but features an additional vertex shader, which provides performance equivalent to that of the GeForce 4 Ti. ==Performance==