I first spotted a blurb over at Warp2Search stating that Beyond3D had scoured over the collections of whitepapers, technical specs, and presentations for nVidia's NV30 and ATI's R300 chips and compiled it into one neat article. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they had a couple of the cards right there to review!

ATI published its powerful DX9 card, R300, in August, 2002 and has become the leader this time. However, R300 still has many secrets and in comparison with NVIDIA's NV30, which has been delayed again and again for some reason(s), is even more of an enigma. And rumors only make this situation even worse.

 

By way of satisfying my own curiosity, I've read many technical documents, including papers, whitepapers, specifications, and presentations about NV30 and R300. By comparing R300 with NV30, I can find many interesting things about their architectures, especially NV30. So, I have written this article to share this pleasure with others.