De mannen van iXBT-Hardware hebben besloten om hun preview van de nVidia NV11 en NV15 nogmaals online te parkeren (zie ook dit bericht van 13 januari). In de tussentijd hebben ze de inhoud wat kunnen verversen met wat nieuwe info. Zo zal de NV15 vergeleken met de GeForce 256 over een compleet nieuwe graphics core beschikken die op ongeveer 160-200MHz zal draaien. Zoals al bekend kunnen de vier rendering pipelines van de NV15 twee textures tegelijk verwerken wat in een multi-texturing omgeving zoals Quake III Arena minimaal dezelfde fillrate oplevert als de 3dfx Voodoo5 6000 (664Mpix/s):
The core clock frequency of both, NV15 and NV11, will be equal to 160-200MHz. It is the nominal frequency. We would like to remind you that the nominal core frequency of GeForce 256 is 120MHz, and the chip proved easily overclockable up to 130-135MHz, while some pieces overclocked even to 160MHz! In this respect, we suppose that NV15 and NV11 will allow overclocking to 250MHz. NV11 mobile version will be also able of working at lower frequencies. The clock frequency reduction will lead to general performance drop. However, in case of mobile computers low power consumption and minimum heat dissipation are much more important.
The key innovation in NV15 and NV11 is that each pixel rendering pipeline can now boast not a single texturing block as we saw in GeForce 256, but two of them. This provides the so called "free" multitexturing, when two textures are applied over one pixel and the general peak fillrate doesn't drop. Moreover, it appears possible to arrange hardware anisotropic filtering based on 16 texture samples. This should undoubtedly have a highly positive effect on 3D graphics quality even compared to GeForce 256.
[...] The graphics cards manufacturers are going to receive the first NV15 and NV11 chips in March-April. The official announcement is planned for end of March and probably we will also see the first real graphics cards based on the new GPUs, and the mass sales will start in the second quarter. The manufacturing of GeForce 256 chips is very likely to cease as soon as the mass manufacturing of NV15 and NV11 gets started. And if we take into account, that there will hardly be any DDR SGRAM chips shortage, then we can expect most NV15 and NV11 cards to be equipped exactly with the memory of this type.
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