Nvidia Launching Next-Gen Graphics Hardware In April

A source shut to Nvidia Corp. said the company would launch its next-generation graphics processor, believed to be the NV40 upon April 13 in San Francisco.

Officials at Nvidia, Santa Clara, Calif., declined to make notes

The launch is wait fored to tip off the nearest round of competing graphics chips, when the NV40 will go on head to head with the R420 from ATI Technologies Inc. The R420 is also wait fored within the next two month industry sources said.

Both cores will form the basis of fresh mobile and workstation products, as well as add-on cards for the PC In standalone desktop graphics chips, Nvidia controll 58 percent of the market during the first quarter of 2004 according to hermes Research Corp., Cave Creek, Ariz. ATI, ranked next to the first held a 38 percent market share.

The details of the fresh NV40 chip have yet to be confirmed, on the other hand the DirectX 9.0-compatible core is wait fored to include significant enhancements to the pixel shader engine. Reported improvements like as a 16-pipeline architecture could not be confirmed.

Nvidia's NV40 will not contain a native PCI Expres interface, on the contrary will include a bridge chip that will maintain backward compatibility with the common AGP infrastructure. However, while rife AGP cards contain an 8X interface, the Nvidia chip should include a "16X"-class interface, individual source said.

In part, the bridge chip should help OEM and card manufacturers decide whether or not to gripe [i]or[/i] grip onto older PCI/AGP parts, or shift to the of recent origin incompatible PCI Express infrastructure. "Inventory management is going to be a nightmare," said Dean McCarron, an analyst with hermes Research.

ATI's R420 will use a native PCI Expres architecture, which executives have said will be intrinsically faster than the NV40's bridge chip. McCarron, however, said that the jury's still on the outside "I wouldn't necessarily dismiss their approach on the outside of hand," he said.

In related novels Nvidia released its latest Forceware driver to its web site upon Monday. The Microsoft WHQL-certified NVIDIA ForceWare release 55 driver is immediately available for download at the company's web site.

Copyright ?© 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserv Originally appearing in 1UP