In tegenstelling tot de vorige ATI kaart heeft ook John Carmack zijn support bekend gemaakt en het is te hopen dat we enkele van de mooie ATI features in Doom 3 terug mogen vinden. Truform anybody?
Based on the current specs of NV30, believe it or not, it will be faster than the Radeon 9700. Since both ATI and NVIDIA must support DirectX 9, you can already gue at a lot of the specifications for NV30. It will obviously have support for Pixel and Vertex Shader 2.0; you can expect it to have 8 pipes and with ATI and Matrox both sporting a 256-bit DDR memory bus, you can also expect it to have one too. The one benefit NVIDIA will have with NV30 will be that it will be manufactured on a 0.13-micron proce . Not only does that mean that NVIDIA's chip will be smaller but it also means that they can run at higher clock speeds, which can give it the edge over the Radeon 9700.
ATI is well aware of this, and the one thing they have going for them is that NV30 won't be out anytime soon. The 0.13-micron chip has been delayed a bit and the current word is that a November release can be expected, with boards shipping shortly thereafter. The folks over at ATI are banking on NV30 being a 2003 part, so that the Radeon 9700 can close out this year with a bang. If you want the absolute fastest graphics card available, the Radeon 9700 fits the bill better than any GeForce4 or Parhelia; and it will continue to do so for months to come.
Dat Nvidia een schepje bovenop deze resultaten zal doen is praktisch zeker. Maar over hoeveel procent winst hebben we het, welke nieuwe features introduceert Nvidia en hoeveel maanden later komt de NV30 chipset uit?
De 'oorlog' om de beste chipset is in ieder geval weer helemaal terug.
Met dank aan MazeWing en Hastur voor het melden van dit nieuws.