A New Graphics Card Changes the Game

By Austin Grossman Wednesday, Sept. 08, 1999
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At least once a year the standard for PC graphics changes. You think you've got the ultimate in time-wasting, reality-evading gaming hardware on your desktop, and then someone somewhere ups the ante for what's possible on a PC. It's about to happen again, when nVidia's GeForce 256 graphics accelerator card hits the stores in late September.

What's different about the GeForce 256? First, the numbers. The GeForce 256 draws 15 million onscreen triangles per second (a very basic measure of how geometrically complex a scene a computer can display), with a fill rate (the number of pixels the card can render per second) of over 480 million. Compare that to the current state of the art graphics cards, which deliver around 9 million triangles and 300 million pixels per second, and you'll get a sense of how powerful the GeForce is going to be. MORE >>