Earlier this morning at the Comdex convention in Las Vegas, graphics card giant Nvidia unveiled its latest and greatest card, the GeForce FX, formally known as code name "NV30." Offering a 125 million transistor GPU (graphics processing unit) the chip is heralded as ?the most sophisticated chip of its kind? - EE Times. The GPU is the first to break the 500mhz speed, and the card offers memory running at 1ghz.
Some stats:
Vertex shading instructions: 65,536
Pixel shading instructions: 1,024
Texture maps: 16
Graphics pipelines: 8
Internal data path: 32-bit
Floating-point color: 64-bit and 128-bit
Memory: 128Mb DDR-II
Bus: AGP 8x
(source: EE Times)
Programmable vertices per second: 375 million
Pixels per second: 4 billion
Anti-aliased samples per second: 16 billion
(source: MacCentral)
Let's take a minute to just say, ?Wow.? Done that? Ok good. :) The company says the card will deliver ?cinematic quality? graphics and special effects.
The chip is planned to ship this coming February. There were debates to try and get it out in time for the holiday season. However, the company just didn't find this feasible, so don't go hoping to see it in your stocking over the fire place. ;) The card is priced at the same level of it's closest competitor, the ATI ? Radeon 9700 at $400 USD. Let us not forget, however, that the Radeon has been shipping since last August and since the company has adopted Nvidia's design strategy (Two bases: one working on the current release candidate while the other works on it's replacement) they plan on releasing their new card sometime early next year. So, how long will Nvidia stay on top?
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