Director of covert operations, Christopher Donahue, said the position could not be located outside Australia due to the time difference and hands-on needs of developers. Donahue said the idea of a joint venture with Australian universities was interesting. Last month nVidia mopped up the engineering staff remains of former rival 3dfx after that company's descent into bankruptcy, bringing its count to about 800. The GeForce 3 promises four times the performance of existing GeForce 2 cards using the same memory, company officials said. It is able to render near-photorealistic visuals previously only possible using expensive graphics computers.
Performance is improved by rendering only pixels seen on the monitor.
Earlier cards rendered about 2.4pixels for every pixel seen, because the computer could not determine which would be visible on a two-dimensional screen. The GeForce 3 will be used in Microsoft's upcoming XBox console, considered by some analysts to be a PlayStation 2 killer. But this has led some PC makers, such as Compaq, to question how it will continue to offer Celeron-based value systems for PC gamers. A mobile GeForce 3 is also planned. Huang said building the GeForce 3 was a project as big as Intel's Itanium development.