Many of the new additions to both generations are aimed at the games developers and we are likely to see being used in up and coming games. Both companies seem to have excellent communication with games developers, as shown by "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" and "Get In The Game", where many games have been optimized for both platforms so the consumer gets the most out of their card.

UltraShadow II is a continuation from UltraShadow which was introduced in the NV3x series but of course tweaked for better performance. It helps in areas with complicated shadows from multiple light sources. This should help performance in games, more specifically Doom III, but I wouldn't be surprised if other nVidia supported titles decided to use this.

Something ATi have been discussing a lot is 3Dc. 3Dc is designed to compress normal maps (normal map explanation here) at a rate of 4:1 saving a lot of memory and bandwidth therefore allowing enhanced details to models. It is this attention to detail that will give us eventual photo-realistic gaming. In the Ruby demo written specifically for ATi, they managed to shave off 100mb of space required in the frame buffer using this technique and the results were quite amazing. Compared to DXTC, the results are considerably better, almost lossless. ATi seem to feel that very little extra coding will be necessary to support this new standard.

The Ruby demo in action.. (that's not ruby ;)

Depth of field is something we first saw being fiddled with at the launch of NV30. By specifying where the eye should be looking, the correct objects will appear out of focus. This is another step forward, being supported by both nVidia and ATi.

Anti-Aliasing

Both ATi and Nvidia have moved forward with their Anti-Aliasing technology. nVidia like ATi are now using a Rotated Grid Sampling Pattern, using up to 8x samples (6x for ATi). But ATi have introduced a new method called temporal sampling which as a bonus will also work with older R300 based cards (after a driver update). Basically put, this will take extra samples over two frames instead of one, giving an effective doubling of the samples taken (12x). This will only have a benefit when vSynch is enabled and the frame rate is close to or over that of your monitors refresh rate. We will be taking a closer look at these in the next article.

Pixel Shader Model 3.0

One area nVidia have the upper hand over ATi is with support for PS 3.0, which I'm sure marketing will be leaning quite heavily against. As PS 3.0 is a continuation from PS 2.0, we have been told many games will be able to be patched to take advantage of this feature. ATi feel that there is no particular need for PS 3.0 yet and almost all effects can be achieved with PS 2.0. Interestingly, I'd like to quote CryTek (makers of Far Cry) on this.

"We don’t use PS3.0 everywhere. The general rule is to use as lower shader version as possible. So PS3.0 could be used only in several critical places where it gives performance boost."

So it sounds to me like a feature that may well end up getting used, but is hardly a crippling blow to not have it. When we see some games supporting PS 3.0 we will be able to make more comment.

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