As the time of its release approaches, further details of Nvidia's NV40 chip are beginning to surface which suggest that this will be an all-round impressive competitor for the coveted graphics throne.
As is usually the case Nvidia will release two versions of the NV40, an Ultra and a non-Ultra. The Ultra, which will be the flagship board for the company, will have faster clock and memory speeds but will be extremely expensive, about USD 500. The estimated speed for the memory, at this time, is 600 MHz and it will be GDDR 3 meaning that it will run a lot cooler since it consumes much less power.
The simpler version will cost about USD 300 and will have lower clock and memory speeds.
There are also plans for a 128-bit version of the card.
In its efforts to introduce the new chip as an ultimate cinematic product the graphics giant has plans for a variety of new video features for the NV40. Boards based on the chip will be ready for HDTV and PVR.
The PVR part is the most interesting with Nvidia promising that the chip will be able to handle MPEG 1/2/4 encode and decode as well as WMV9 decode acceleration. If such capabilities become available with the new boards that will mean that work previously carried out by the processor will now be handled by the graphics card, releasing valuable resources for other tasks.
One question about these new details which has yet to be answered however, comes from the Morgan Stanley Semiconductor and Systems Conference which Nvidia's boss, Jen-Hsun Huang addressed. During that conference Mr. Huang mentioned that at any one time there could be as many as five distinct NV4x graphics processors in production...
Such a statement allows for the possibility that some of these features, including the 210 million transistor version of the chip, may be delayed for a long time after April, when the NV40 is scheduled to appear. So it could be that the MPEG capabilities or the 600 MHz memory or any other hyped feature may not surface until the NV45, the fifth of the NV4x chips, is ready.
Either way it is clear that the NV4x is locked and loaded and waiting in ambush for ATI's R420 to begin showing its cards and the Canadian company's chip will need a very good hand if its going to compete with Nvidia's little beast.
