Things have been pretty quiet in the world of graphics card technical development of late, but now that's all about to change thanks to Nvidia and its new GPU - the GeForce3. Designed for DirectX 8 and supporting hardware acceleration of such effects as volumetric fog, particle effects, reflective bump mapping and animated water surfaces, this GPU is a leap in technology over the previous generation of GeForce2 GPU's.

One of the first cards to hit the market using this new processor is the Elsa Gladiac 920. Elsa claims that this gamers' card has higher performance than even its range of GeForce2 Ultra products - and they were fast enough. If you're not technically minded, it might be an idea to skip the next three paragraphs...

The Gladiac 920 supports 2X/4X AGP and is fitted with 64MB of DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM. Although it runs at 200MHz, slower than the previous GeForce2 Ultra, it uses the same 460MHz memory clock with a RAMDAC speed of 350MHz.

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But improved performance isn't the be all and end all of the GeForce3; equally important are the image quality enhancements, courtesy of the chip's support for new shading and anti-aliasing methods. The GeForce3 has a new engine - the nFiniteFX - with new programmable vertex and pixel shaders. The main benefits these bring are that game designers can define different rules for processing vertices and pixels, and these processing rules can be changed at any time. This means that the lighting effects on one object can be different from those applied to another object, for example, making for much greater scene realism.

Anther new feature found on the GeForce3 is something called Quincunx. This provides more efficient FSAA (Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing) by making more intelligent use of 2X oversampling to get higher-quality images, without doing the extra work required in 4X oversampling. Another plus point is that it lowers the memory requirements of anti-aliasing, leaving more space for textures in the card's memory. It will support a maximum resolution of 2,048 pixels by 1,536 pixels with 16.7 million colours at a refresh rate of 75Hz.

The Gladiac 920 will also handle DVD playback, as it includes hardware MPEG acceleration and Elsa supplies Elsamovie 2000 software DVD player with the card. The TV-out port allows you to watch DVD movies on your TV, providing you can use the S-Video interface provided. A little disappointing is the lack of a DVI interface for flat panels, but this shouldn't deter this card's target market of hardcore gamers. A bonus game, fully optimized for the GeForce3 ("Giants: Citizen Kabuto") is also included.

A the time of writing, games that are specially written for DirectX 8 and therefore make the most of the GeForce3's advanced features are very thin on the ground. Once DirectX 8 support becomes more widespread, cards like the Gladiac 920 will become the must-have product for gamers, assuming increased demand drives down the rather frightening price.