ATi R420 & NVIDIA NV40 Presumably Taped Out

Anton Shilov has details of ATi and NVIDIA’s new graphics technologies, both of which may be announced at CeBIT 2004:

Precise specifications of the upcoming graphics developments from leading powerhouses are absent at the moment, a totally extraordinary situation for the recent years. What is known about the chips code-named NVIDIA NV40 and ATI R420 is that they will have more capable and powerful Pixel Shader 3.0 pipelines and Vertex Shader 3.0 processors to correspond the forthcoming DirectX 9.1 API from Microsoft. Following the latest traditions, expect some new memory bandwidth-saving mechanisms, improved speed in “eye-candy” FSAA plus anisotropic filtering modes, much higher geometry power, calculation power and so on.

. . . ATI has two high-end graphics chips in its roadmap for the first half of they year: R420 and R423. The former is designed for AGP 8x, the latter is developed for PCI Express x16. Other specs of both chips are supposed to be the same. NVIDIA has only one high-end chip for the 1H of the year – the code-named NV40. It is not fully clear whether this is an AGP 8x or PEG x16 part, but even in case it is engineered for AGP 8x, NVIDIA still can address the PCI Express market with it, as the company has a special PEG x16 to AGP 8x bridge.

As transpired on The Inquirer, NVIDIA’s NV40 GPU was taped out “in the last days of December of 2003”. Based on some information from sources with presumable knowledge of the matter, ATI managed to receive the first silicon of its R420 visual processing unit a bit earlier than its Santa Clara, California-based rival, though, neither ATI’s nor NVIDIA’s graphics cards partners have received samples of the chips yet.

X-bit labs
ATI R420 and NVIDIA NV40 Presumably Taped Out
- New Graphics Technologies Approaching