Nvidia GeForceFX(NV30) Officially Launched

egarland writes "Tom's Hardware has a new article previewing the new GeForceFX chip and discussing its architecture. 0.13 Micron, 16 GB/s memory bandwidth, 128-bit DDR2 memory interface, 125 M transistors, support for 8x FSAA. Sounds like an interesting chip. They stuck with a 128 bit memory bus so ATI's R300 still has more memory bandwidth (19.8 GB/s) but NVidia has new lossless memory compression so we will have to wait for benchmarks to see if NVidia comes up a winner here. The reference card also sports a massive new cooling system which is worth a look." Readers Oliver Wendell and JavaTenor add links to additional stories at The Register and at AnandTech.

Comments

woot.

[grub]

There I was with my Beowulf cluster of GeForceFX(NV30) cards..
The duct tape glistened in the weak 40 watts of light in my parents' basement. "g1bb0r m3 T-Fl0p5!" I screamed but it was not to be. There was no joy in Mudville, the mighty cluster had blown a fuse.

Love the cooling system

[grub]

I could hook that thing up to my ductwork and save a fortune on natural gas this winter.

To Late For The Fall Leaves

[scotay]

Damn, Nvidia, why couldn't you have this thing ready for fall?

I've been searching for years for a leaf blower that could run Doom III at acceptable frame rates.

Dawn demo looks awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDIA has a few more shots of that Fairy:
1
2
3

"Officially Launched"

[nakaduct]

Release Date: February 2003

Dear Timothy,

1. Do you understand what the word 'launch' means?
2. Are you aware it is not yet February 2003?

My prediction

[Waffle Iron]

There seems to be a trend lately of graphics adapters kludging ever bigger chips and heatsinks onto a PCI card. Motherboards seem to get smaller and more integrated.

I predict that we'll soon be buying big metal graphics controller boxes from nVidia complete with heavy duty power supplies and massive cooling capacity. After you get it home, you'll open up your graphics adapter and insert a little motherboard and CPU into an option slot to complete your computer system.

Exciting

[be-fan]

New hardware mentioned on Slashdot. Now it's time for all the lamers to come up with the following posts:

1) Who needs all that power anyway? I'm running Windows XP just fine here on my 486SX/33!

2) Why cares if it's fast? It uses up too much power and has a *fan* on it. God forbid a computer have a fan on it! It sucks because it's not fan-less like my Mac!

3) Sure it might be fast, but I bet it isn't as *efficient* as a G4!

4) NVIDIA sucks because it's drivers are closed source.

Did I forget anything? Anyway, I couldn't care less what the lamers think. This is a genuinely cool piece of hardware. There are a few things that make it so:

1) 500 MHz! That's half a gigahertz! A very large jump in clock-speed here, much more so than the usual 33 MHz pussy-footing the industry (particularly Intel!) is guilty of.

2) Compressed-memory access. Ah, computational power exceeds memory bandwidth to the point that it's more efficient just to compress the data before sending it over the bus... The 16 GB/sec memory bandwidth (which is also quite a big jump from existing machines) is made even more impressive by a lossless compression that can achieve 4:1 ratios. This is very helpful for multisample AA graphics, because it reduces the memory bandwidth hit to just the pixels that occupy the edges of polygons rather than every pixel in the scene.

3) Fully floating point pixel pipelines. Carmack was asking for 64-bit floating-point point pipelines a while ago. While this doesn't quite get there (it's 32-bit floating point) it is a major step, and makes life a lot easier for game developers.

Overall, this card is definately in the cards for me :) Maybe along with a dual Opteron machine. And before you scream excess, have you checked Pricewatch lateley? I remember paying $3300 for a single processor PII-300 with 64MB of RAM and a Riva 128 in January of 1998. If the Opterons don't cost that much more than the high-end Athlons today, I could put together this machine for significantly less than that!