Last year, David Kirk from NVIDIA talked about the near future of rendering three to five years out. He said the big improvements won't necessarily be in the number of pixels/sec (though they will increase of course), but rather in the quality or "intelligence" of those pixels. He said we'll see far more advanced programmable per-pixel shading and lighting algorithms that take into account material properties, curved surfaces, use volumetric textures, and have far more complex single-pass texture blending. He described shifting the battle "…from more pixels to smarter pixels."

Right, R300 and NV30 are a big step toward Kirk’s direction today.

ATTENTION: Although I have tried my best to ensure the accuracy of my information, don't be too serious about it. Because this is just a technical analysis and predication between a true, currently available, DX9 card and a paper-based card from a tech fan. As we all know, it is almost impossible that the specifications for marketing don't have errors. Unfortunately, I have to write this article based on such materials. Besides, R300 is here now, and NV30 is still on the paper. Again, I don't intend to ignite a flame war in the fine Beyond3D forum, and write this article just for sharing pleasure with people like me. (As noted before, while much is already known of the capabilities of NVIDIA's future hardware, there is much not known about R300 despite its availability for some time now and rumours of a follow up, R350, are already appearing whose capabilities we know even less about -Ed.)

DX9 Beta2.1 Specification - Microsoft

Graphics Hardware 2002 - RADEONâ„¢ 9700 Architecture and 3D Performance - ATI
SIGGRAPH 2002 - State of the Art in Hardware Shading Course Notes - ATI
SIGGRAPH 2002 - Hardware Shading on the ATI RADEONT9700 - ATI
GDC 2002 - Advanced Pixel Shading Techniques - ATI
Programmability Features of Graphics Hardware - ATI
SMARTSHADERT TECHNOLOGY WHITE PAPER - ATI

OpenGL Extension Specifications for the CineFX Architecture (NV30) - NVIDIA
NV30 OpenGL Extensions - NVIDIA
"CineFX" Architecture Real-Time Cinematic Rendering - NVIDIA
Siggraph 2002 - CineFX Architecture - NVIDIA
Siggraph 2002 - Programmable Graphics Technology - NVIDIA
Siggraph 2002 - Overview of Graphics Hardware – NVIDIA
Graphics Hardware 2002 - GeForce 4 - NVIDIA
When 10M Gates Just Isn't Enough ... The GPU Challenge - NVIDIA

Graphics Hardware 2002 - Efficient Partitioning of Fragment Shaders for Programmable Graphics Hardware - Stanford

Beyond3D forum - Beyond3D.com