We've covered the GeForce 256 'In Depth' as well as published our DDR Guide before so look back at those if you require more information. For the rest of you, here's our Sharky with a quick reminder:
- 256-bit Data transfer bandwidth
- 350MHz RAMDAC
- AGP 4x/2x/1x with fast writes
- Peak fill rate of 480 million bilinear filtered, multi-textured pixels
- Up to 15 million triangles per second at peak rates Integrated transform, lighting, setup and rendering engines
- Integrated transform, lighting, setup and rendering engines
- Four 32-bit 3D rendering pipeline
- 4 texture mapped, lit pixels per clock cycle
- Single pass multi-texturing support (DirectX®6.X and OpenGL® ICD)
The GeForce 256 has been coined a GPU, or Graphic Processing Unit, by NVIDIA and is a single-chip processor combining integrated transform, lighting, triangle set-up and rendering engines into a single chip. The GeForce 256 chip is manufactured on a .22u die, comprised of over 22 million transistors and is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second. The main thrust of the GeForce 256 is to offload much of the graphics set-up and processing away from CPU and onto the GPU.
The 64MB Dell board itself might look similar to a 32MB DDR reference design but it isn't. Looks apart, Dell Computer Corporation told Sharky Extreme that they worked with NVIDIA from start to finish on the GeForce board design going through schematics and design details and focusing on quality and reliability as well as performance and the feature set. Apparently this combo was such a success that the final product became rubber stamped by NVIDIA and is now the '64MB reference design'. It has been farmed out to all of NVIDIA's other OEM customers.
According to Dell, who allocated 50 of their own engineers to the project, manufacturing of the card has been outsourced to an unnamed OEM. This card is not what you'd call an OEM-lite version. With DVI support for Dell's Flat Panels and 64MB of memory, it has the makings of the gamer's "card of choice" for the next little while.