December 13^th, 2002 (12:00am) - Nvidia has leaked alot of information on the new

GeforceFX. We have grabbed some spec’s on the new

chipsets for those of you willing to fork up the

400 bucks for Nvidias newest chip this is a

pleasurful experience. Then again, if you just

bought ATI’s latest, I’m very sorry.

Check out what Gamers.com said about the

GeforceFX.

If there’s one thing this industry is lousy

at, it’s keeping secrets. The veil of mystery

surrounding Nvidia’s NV30, the would-be

Radeon-killer, had more holes in it than the

Shroud of Turin. While rumors of the NV30’s

specifications have been surfacing since last

March, it wasn’t until November’s Comdex that the

Santa Clara-based company let us in on what we

pretty much knew already: NV30 is gonna be one

ferociously powerful graphics card.
Christened the GeForceFX (an amalgam of "effects"

and an homage to the 3dfx engineers currently

working at Nvidia), the card’s entirely new

architecture is reminiscent of Nvidia’s jump from

the GeForce2 to the GeForce3. While it’s easy to

look at the GeForceFX as simply more muscle,

Nvidia likes to think of it more as a highly

programmable processor, with myriad features that

game developers will eventually have a much

easier time tapping.

Unfortunately, the GeForceFX still isn’t

available. Originally scheduled to ship in late

2002, Nvidia now expects the FX by February. The

cause of the delay has been a source of

considerable speculation, but it seems it’s

mostly due to Nvidia’s desire to reduce the size

of the transistors from .15 microns to .13

microns, to conserve energy and reduce heat. The

GeForceFX chip also needed 125 million

transistors to achieve DirectX 9 compliance,

because DX 9 requires floating-point

calculations.

Unlike the Radeon 9700’s 256-bit DDR1 memory

interface, the GeForceFX uses a 128-bit DDR-2

memory interface, which Nvidia believes to be

faster and more efficient. Nvidia refused to

specify final clock speeds for the GeForceFX, but

it’s hinted that at least one iteration of the

card will run somewhere close to 500MHz. Similar

to the Radeon 9700, the GeForceFX will support

AGP 8x, though that feature is academic at this

point since we haven’t come close to maxing out

the AGP bus.

Since we’ve yet to get our hands on a board, we

can’t say how it will benchmark next to the

Radeon 9700. Nvidia is claiming that the

GeForceFX will have a 30 to 50 percent overall

performance advantage over the Radeon 9700, and a

40 percent advantage over the R9700 in Doom 3.

However, it’s important to point out that Doom 3

is essentially a DX8 title. Like the R9700, the

GeForceFX will require a power connector to

operate. Unlike the R9700, though, failing to

connect the power cable won’t disable the part;

it will simply force it to run at a slower clock

speed.

Knowing that gamers demand the very best

components, we won’t be surprised if people shell

out $400 for the top-of-the-line graphics card.

Nevertheless, the FX’s February ETA puts it that

much closer to the release of ATI’s next salvo

(the rumored R10000). Add to that a dearth of

titles that will even take advantage of the

technology, and we again find ourselves in the

place where the hardware may be years ahead of

the software.