For over two years now, since the introduction of the original GeForce, Nvidia has been on top of the competition totally obliterating beloved 3dfx, and painfully choking ATi to the point of death. Up until now speed has been the major driving force in the ritualistic upgrading of our video cards, but things are going to change starting with the GeForce 3. Offering only a marginal performance increase over the GeForce 2 Ultra (5-10%), the GeForce3 boosts new visual features, fully accelerated in hardware, which will literally blow your mind.

Why the sudden shift in focus from blazing increased speeds to better, more realistic visuals? Blame Microsoft's new fangled DirectX 8. Basically the GeForce3 is the first fully programmable video chipset that takes full advantage of everything DirectX 8 has to offer. Essentially game programmers now program their own specific 3d pipelines through the GeForce3. This will lead new unique visual effects, fully powered by the GeForce 3, in upcoming games.

For those of you who have been living under a rock, Microsoft's upcoming Xbox will also use a slightly modified version of the GeForce3. This is great for PC gamers as this will inevitably lead to many more games taking full advantage of the new visual features, arriving on both the Xbox and PC. Because of their glaring similarities developers should have no trouble at all porting games from the Xbox to PC, and visa versa.

Visiontek

One of the first widely available, and least expensive GeFoce3 based cards is the offering from Visiontek. A somewhat barebones unit the Visiontek follows Nvidia's reference design PCB almost exactly. There no software bundle, and only a skimpy manual to guide you through installation. My unit didn't even come with a driver CD despite being clearly printed on that package that one should have been supplied.

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