Some rumours have arisen that NVIDIA will their NV40 on April 13 in San Francisco.
As you remember, the next generation of NVIDIA’s GPUs aka NV40 will be manufactured with 0.13micron technology and will contain 210 million transistors. The information circulating around the web says that the new NVIDIA solution will feature 16 rendering pipelines, and will support vertex shaders 3.0 and pixel shaders 3.0. NVIDIA expects NV40 to provide a significant performance boost compared to what their current solutions demonstrate.
Despite the tendency of the graphics solutions moving towards PCI Express, NV40 has no native support of this bus. NVIDIA expects PCI Express to be not so greatly demanded this year that is why NV40 based graphics cards will be able to support PCI Express but only via the additional bridge chip.
Competing solution from ATI also known as R420 will be also announced within the same timeframe and will support PCI Express natively. So far there is no objective info about the performance of the upcoming NV40 and R420 solutions.
Manufacturers of NVIDIA based graphics solutions told our rerpresentative at the CeBIT show, Anton Shilov, that they were going to start mass production of NV40 based cards in May.
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