Our thanks to Stomped, which pointed out this excellent article at Riva3D which not only provides detailed stats and analysis of the new NVIDIA GeForce 3 chipset but also a set of screen shots which are truly astounding to behold. Unfortunately the Riva3D site is a victim of its own success -- currently the server is under a brutal load and pages and images only load intermittently. Keep trying, this article and its images are worth it!

Although only select PC developers have their hands on GeForce 3-based cards at the moment, enough is known about the chipset to do a detailed analysis of what it might mean for games. High on the long list of new features is the chipset's support for "per-pixel shading" and "vertex shading," two technologies which will allow a new revolution in realistic surfaces and textures in future games. However the feature list doesn't stop there -- the GeForce 3 is designed from the ground-up with the philosophy that graphics should be handled by the GPU, not the CPU, and thus many features are designed to take jobs once done by your computer and move them to the video card itself. Here is one example from the article:

Higher-Order
Surfaces are best described with examples, such as the surface of
rolling hills, the folds in clothing, or any sort of curved
surface. To create these types of surfaces, developers had to use
groups of triangles, each independently described as to it’s
location, angle, and rotation in the scene. DX8 and the GeForce 3
allow the creation of these surfaces using splines, which are
basically control points that describe the curve between any set
of coordinates. Using splines makes creating and implementing
high-order surfaces much more efficient and much, much faster.

Stomped

GeForce 3 Specs, Images at Riva3D

NVIDIA (add to watch list)

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