Next week NVIDIA is going to launch its NV40. According to the Inq this chip has 222 million transistors. The NV40 is produced by IBM on a 130nm architecture. It will use the 60 series of drivers, currently 60.70.
As we said before Nvidia will push hard the fact that it is the only firm that will have a Pixel Shader 3.0 model on the market and it will focus its marketing efforts there. This means that apart from full support for Shader Model 3.0 it will support model 3.0 Vertex Texture Fetch/Long programs/Pixel Shader flow control Vertex Texture Fetch/Long programs/Pixel Shader flow control and full speed fp32 shading. Let's hope everyone understands what this means.
There are plenty of other features of the chip which can do 16 pixels per clock Color & Z or 32 pixels per clock Z-only, 64-bit FP Frame Buffer Blending & Display, Lossless Color & Z-Compression and a new Antialiasing approach called High Quality AA - Rotated Grid full MTR (multi target rendering I guess), and accelerated shadow rendering.
Geforce 6800 Ultra has two power connectors and is, surprisingly a one slot card for its reference card.
It uses GDDR3 memory clocked at 550MHz but some partners might go even higher.
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