NSR is just a marketing term though. It's just the name of their pixel pipeline.
Technically all games use it, although not all of them may use the new effects introduced with the GF series.
swaaye wrote:Though NV didn't have EMBM support until GeForce 3 which had them behind ATI and even Matrox for years.
EMBM is just a simple 2D texturing trick though, where dot3 is 'proper' per-pixel lighting.
What EMBM does is to have two textures:
1) A perturbation map
2) A 2d environment map (spherical texture)
Instead of just calculating the texture coordinates for the environmemt map per-pixel, EMBM will do a lookup in the perturbation map at every pixel, and add these values to the texture coordinates before doing the envmap lookup.
The effect will sorta look like per-pixel bumpmapping, but it is obviously not a mathematical lighting model. It's purely image-based, and these spherical maps have various limitations, and are usually not updated realtime with accurate lighting info, so they're just static.
Dot3 on the other hand is just what it says: it performs a 3d dotproduct per-pixel.
And that is *real* per-pixel lighting: you feed it two 3d vectors as input (which can either come from interpolated vertex data, such as the colour channels or texture coordinates, or from a normalmap texture), and it will calculate the dotproduct between them.
Dotproducts are obviously a big part of the usual lighting models, such as Lambert and Blinn-Phong.
So combining the dot3 with the proper input and some extra attenuation factors (possibly multiple passes), you can do very advanced per-pixel lighting with a true mathematical lighting model, with multiple dynamic lightsources.
So dot3 is the 'real thing', where EMBM is 'kids stuff'. So it was not nVidia who was behind.