The first thing to get over with the GeForce3 is that the 0.15-micron core, with 57 million transistors, has the same number of pixel pipelines and is clocked at the same core speed as NVIDIA´s GeForce2 GTS.

The reason for the die-shrink was to make room for the 128% increase in transistor count and to keep the GPU from eating too much power although we already expect it to run fairly hot. For those that don´t remember, the GeForce2 GTS core was produced on a 0.18-micron fabrication process and boasted an incredible 25 million transistors. At 57 million transistors, the GeForce3 GPU is more complex than Intel´s Pentium 4 processor in terms of sheer transistor count. Obviously this is a flawed comparison since the CPU guys have a much tougher job cramming in all the logic into as small and as efficient of an area, but it is a noteworthy parallel to make.