Page "GeForce 2 Series" Paragraph 3

The GeForce 2 architecture is similar to the previous GeForce 256 line but with various improvements.

Compared to the 220 nm GeForce 256, GeForce 2 is built on a 180 nm manufacturing process, making the silicon more dense and allowing for more transistors and a higher clock speed.

The most significant change for 3D acceleration is the addition of a second texture mapping unit to each of the four pixel pipelines.

Some say the second TMU was there in the original Geforce NSR ( NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer ) but dual-texturing was disabled due to a hardware bug ; NSR's unique ability to do single-cycle trilinear texture filtering supports this suggestion.

This doubles the texture fillrate per clock compared to the previous generation and is the reasoning behind the GeForce 2 GTS's naming suffix: GigaTexel Shader ( GTS ).

The GeForce 2 also formally introduces the NSR, a primitive type of programmable pixel pipeline that is somewhat similar to later pixel shaders.

This functionality is also present in GeForce 256 but was unpublicized.

Another hardware enhancement is an upgraded video processing pipeline, called HDVP ( high definition video processor ).

HDVP supports motion video playback at HDTV-resolutions ( MP @ HL ).