Once the Nvidia PR machine kicked into gear information about the NV40 has been flying all over the WWW. ATI has hardly had a chance to complain about important leaked information or to accidentally drop some papers in an exhibition floor.
As launch time approached and as the hype on Nvidia made the NV40 seem more like a space shuttle than a simple graphics card, ATI has had to react and has finally managed to misplace some vital R420 information.
There will be two versions of ATI's new chip. One based on DDR1 and one based on the DDR2 variation, also known as GDDR 3. The DDR1 boards have been codenamed Skateboard while the second R420 boards will get the more prestigious Olympic Snowboard codename.
All R420 based cards will be AGP 8X and VGA, DVI and VIVO ready and will support DirectX 9.0c meaning that they will be pixel shader 3.0 ready.
The high end boards will carry the XT mark, not a great surprise there, and will run at 500MHz for the GPU and at about 1000MHz for the memory. They will carry 256 MB of memory (8x32) with a 256-bit bus.
Much more information on these cards will come up as we approach CeBit and we will pass on any further information on them.
