Lumenex Engine

The GeForce 8800 GPUs feature the new NVIDIA Lumenex Engine. Thanks to this engine, these cards will finally support HDR (High Dynamic Range) with anti-aliasing enabled!

The new engine supports HDR with up to 128-bit precision. That's 32-bit floating point value per component which allows for a great range of colours, with smoother gradients.

When it comes to anti-aliasing, the Lumenex engine introduces a new anti-aliasing algorithm that NVIDIA claims can provide 16x full-screen multisampled anti-aliasing quality with the performance impact of 4x multisampled anti-aliasing. That's interesting... although if you read between the lines, you will realize that it's true 16x multisampled anti-aliasing.

The Lumenex engine also brings with it support for angle-independent anisotropic filtering and geometry deformation. Geometry deformation allows surfaces to be deformed (e.g. skin folding) to give a more realistic appearance of movement.

At the press conference, we were given a demonstration of a 3D rendering of Adrianne Curry, the supermodel who was the winner of the reality show, America's Top Model. Although it was still a work in progress, it demonstrated just how the new Lumenex engine with geometry deformation can make movement of any body part look more realistic.

The GeForce 8800 GPUs also comes with a new 10-bit colour pipeline. When used with 10-bit DACs, these cards can deliver over a billion colours. It's about time, we say!

PureVideo HD

The GeForce 8800 GPUs all come with NVIDIA PureVideo HD capability built-in. It consists of dedicated video processing hardware (SIMD vector processor, motion estimation engine and HD video decoder), software drivers and video players that not only accelerate but also enhance the image quality of high-definition video based on the H.265, VC-1, WMV/WMV-HD and MPEG2 HD formats.

PureVideo HD can deliver 720p, 1080i and 1080p outputs with HD noise reduction and HD edge enhancement. In addition, all GeForce 8800 GPUs are HDCP-capable, allowing your PC to playback encrypted video content on HDCP-compliant displays.

NVIDIA tested the GeForce 8800 GPUs using the HQV Benchmark and proudly announced that all GeForce 8800 GPUs will attain 128 points out of 130 points in that benchmark. HQV Benchmark, incidentally, evaluates standard definition video de-interlacing, motion correction, noise reduction, film cadence detection and detail enhancement.