NVIDIA reeling from ATI blow

When it comes to the technological wiz-bangery of the latest and greatest chipsets NVIDIA is not usually vocal until the all important product launch. Of course, for the past few years it has enjoyed almost complete freedom in determining where the

When it comes to the technological wiz-bangery of the latest and greatest chipsets NVIDIA is not usually vocal until the all important product launch. Of course, for the past few years it has enjoyed almost complete freedom in determining where the 3D marketplace is headed, and has had the luxury of being first on the scene with new 3D tech.

Well that was until last week at least, when pretender to the throne, ATI, threw its DirectX9 hat into the ring a few months early with the unveiling of the RADEON 9700, which has made a big effort to suck the wind out of NVIDIAs sails, despite a preemptive launch of the nForce2 chipset the day before ATI's big launch. The problem is that the whispers around the industry are that NVIDIA is still a fair way away from having working sample boards of its next generation NV30 GPU. This is due to the need for a 0.13micron fabrication process, something which fabrication partner TSMC is rumoured to still be having problems with, and time spent dedicated to work on the XBox GPU, which threw NVIDIAs famous six month product cycle out of whack.

Just as ATI's RADEON 9700 announcement took some of the wind out of the sails of Matrox's recent Parhelia Launch, NVIDIA is obviously confident that it is onto a winner with NV30. So confident in fact that ahead of this week's SIGRAPH conference it has done the almost unprecedented thing of releasing a marketing speak laced PDF outlining some of the features of the NV3X architecture, which has been apparently been internally dubbed 'CineFX' (it is a sad sad day when even the engineers start speaking marketease), due to its ability to produce cinematic quality 3D.

The PDF outlines a small section of features relating to the vertex and pixel shading abilities of the NV3X architecture and concludes with a table outlining the advances over the current generation NV2X architecture. Like ATI, NVIDIA are supporting the new Vertex and Pixel shader 2.0 standards, and have upped the internal colour precision of the chipset. In order to facilitate developers actually using these new features sometime in this decade, NVIDIA is now really pimping the recently announced Cg high level programming language (ATI has a similar language in the pipeline called RenderMonkey).

There is, of course, no hard data on the actual chip architecture, or rumours that the NV30 will employ 3dfx technology like a seperate Transform and Lighting processor, but this does give us the best insight yet into what we should expect from NV30. ATI may have fired a broadside into the NVIDIA camp with RADEON 9700, but NVIDIA is keen to show that they aren't going to give up market leadership without some serious fighting.

The PDF file in question can be found here, with more information hiding at the NVIDIA developer site.

-John Gillooly