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MSI StarForce MS8822

MSI is one of the key partners of AMD and nVidia stating their own role as technology assembler working with Technology Leaders. It is not surprising that MSI was one of the first companies to hit the market with their own version of the GeForce3 named StarForce 822.

The technical specs are the same as for any other GeForce3:

MSI StarForce 8822 with TIVO daughter board. Note the absence of heatsinks from the local memory

• 0.15 micron manufacturing process
• 57 million transistors
• 200 MHz graphics core clock speed
• 4 rendering pixel pipelines
• 2 Simultaneous Textures Per Pixel
• 4 Maximum Active Textures Per Pixel per Pass
• 36 (4 per combiner, 9 combiners) Pixel Shading Operations per Pass
• 128 Vertex Instructions Per Vertex per Pass: 12
• 128 bit memory interface 8
• DDR SDRAM/SGRAM support
• 3.8 ns Memory, 230 MHz clock rate / 460 MHz data rate
• 7.4 Gbps peak memory bandwidth
• 64 MB local memory (128 MB optional)
• 350 MHz RAMDAC
• Max resolution - 2048x1536@75 Hz
• TMDS transmitter for digital monitors and supports resolution up to 1600x1200
• AGP x2/x4 support
• Hardware T&L with 80 GFLOPS performance
• Full hardware support for DirectX 8.0, D3D and OpenGL 1.2
• Full support for programmable hardware Vertex Shaders (DX8 API)
• Full support for programmable hardware Pixel Shaders (DX8 API)
• Cube environment mapping support
• Support for hardware tesselation of high order surfaces and patches
• Hardware support for bump mapping: Embossing, Dot Product3 and EMBM
• Support for S3TC and DXTC texture compression methods
• HRAA (FSAA) support on the base of different techniques of multisampling(2 x, 4 x, Quincunx)
• LightSpeed memory architecture: Crossbar memory controller divided into 4 x 32 bit independent buses, compressed Z buffer support and HSR support (z-occlusion culling) using early Z query
• Textures up to 4096x4096 @ 32 bit.

Close-up of one of the Elite-MT 3.8 ns DDR chips

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