Looking at a new news story over at the Inquirer it's clear that NVIDIA's marketing departement is excited about their new NV40 claiming that it has three times the performance, and eight times faster pixel shaders than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.
Further they claim four times faster performance in Doom III and seven times faster performance in Half Life II !
The NV40 supports Shaders 3.0 and will use GDDR2 or GDDR3 memory, probably clocked at 600MHz (1200MHz DDR).
There will be two implementations of NV40 chips - as always NV40 U implies Ultra, where Ultra will end up faster. It's still too early to know the clock speeds of this solution but more then 500MHz is what Nvidia hopes for. We mentioned that they had silicon up and running at 300MHz but you can be sure the final stuff will end up faster.
This time Nvidia wants to make cards more silent than NV30 and we're not being too ingenious when we guess this is what the phrase 'Silent Running' is all about. Even Nvidia now knows that people like quiet graphic cards.
Nvidia calls its NV40 board an "enthusiast" board since it will come at high end price. Boards will be samples this month, February, with availability in April. The card will have two monitor outs with both DVI, VGA and combinations are possible [two DVI, two VGAs, VGA and DVI] and, of course ,TV out.
The expected launch date is the 18th of March at Cebit.
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