NVIDIA's Back with NV35 - GeForceFX 5900 Ultra

Stages 3 & 4: Triangle Setup & Rasterization

We've explained basically what happens in these two stages, but with the NV35 NVIDIA introduced another method to save processing power that would otherwise occur in the next stage of the pipeline.

With the next-generation of games, shadows will become increasingly more complicated due to complex lighting algorithms. Along the lines of technologies such as HyperZ or general occlusion culling, NVIDIA has outfitted the NV35 with something they like to call "UltraShadow."

The UltraShadow technology is fairly simple in practice; a developer just needs to specify boundaries for an object, indicating the region that a shadow would be cast upon based on a particular light source. These boundaries then become the limits for any shadow calculations, and thus excess processing is avoided as you can see from the image below.