NVIDIA
One of the meetings I've had is of course NVIDIA. We visit them ever since they started attending the CeBIT. As usual I met Andrew Humber who I still know from the 3dfx era (he worked for them as PR manager) and Adam Foat who I met recently. Adam also started at 3dfx as helpdesk/support employee.
I just realized that some of you don't even know who 3dfx was .. 3dfx was a king graphics chipset manufacturer a few years ago which was taken over by NVIDIA after a nasty and rough period. Some of the technology and ideas of 3dfx are now actually included into the all new GeForce FX. Products in the 3dfx era where of course the Voodoo series (like Graphics, Banshee, Rush, II, 3, 4 and 5). In fact if you visit our hardware review section you'll still see a handful of reviews on them. I'll give you one line of a Voodoo Graphics review 'So I installed it without any trouble into my Pentium 120, 48Mb & 4 Gig System.' Hilarious isn't it.
I can't enclose too much details as most of the meeting was NDA material. We briefly talked about the new mobility line-up and of course the Desktop line-up from which you know by now will be replaced by GeForce FX products, by next month already, completely. That means a complete
DirectX9 compatible product in all segments. This means a GeForce FX based graphics card in the low, mid, and high-end segment. In the end this will likely replace the GeForce 3 and 4 range of products as this series is competing directly at them at a comparable price and performance while it has the advantage of being a full DirectX 9 compatible product.
The upcoming product line up like this:
- GeForce FX 5800 Ultra 500/500 Core/Memory ~$399
- GeForce FX 5800 400/400 Core/Memory ~ $299
- GeForce FX 5600 Ultra 350/350 Core/Memory ~ $199
- GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 325/325 Core/Memory ~ $149
- GeForce FX 5200 275/275 Core/Memory ~ $99
| Feature |
5800 Models |
5600 Models |
5200 Models |
| CineFX Engine |
√ |
√ |
√ |
| Intellisample Technology |
√ |
√ |
N/A |
| DirectX 9 |
√ |
√ |
√ |
| AGP |
8X |
8X |
8X |
| UDA |
√ |
√ |
√ |
| Process |
0.13µ |
0.13µ |
0.15µ |
| Pipelines |
8 |
4 |
4 |
| Memory |
DDR-II |
DDR-II |
DDR |
| Verices/sec. |
200 Million |
88 Million |
81 Million |
With a bit of luck we'll have 5200 and 5600 cards in by next week so we can do a full test on them. Regarding FlowFX - They've heard, they've listened and it's not going to happen again in the future.
Last words I'm going to add regarding the NDA, the bigger part of my meeting was a demonstration of a future product (let's call it NV something). I can't talk about it, but I did see it running believe me when I say .. It's everything you expect, I was very impressed. Okay, have to shut up now.
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