29 March 2003
By: Agi
In some respects, the launch of NVIDIA's GeForce FX (NV30) turned out to be a disappointment. The cards were extremely noisy and the performance was less spectacular. When you add in the lack of availabilty of the cards, the uncertain status of the 5800 Ultra and the imminent release of new cards from ATI, the launch of the NV30 almost was a non-event. How is NVIDIA going to respond?
NVIDIA's answer will be the NV35. While details have been closely guarded, NVIDIA has pubicly stated to expect great things from the NV35...but what will change?
Most of the reviews of the GeForce FX have identified two main areas of
concern:
1. Speed
2. Noise
While the GeForce FX employs 1000MHz DDR2 memory, it is bottlenecked by a 128-bit memory bus. Even though Matrox, ATI and 3dlabs had already moved to a 256-bit bus, NVIDIA opted for a narrower but faster design. The result? The overall memory bandwidth of the GeForce FX even trails that of the older RADEON 9700 Pro (19.8GB/s for the 9700 Pro vs. 16GB/s for the 5800 Ultra). With the new RADEON 9800 Pro, ATI has managed to up the ante to 21.8GB/s of memory bandwidth. Rumours circulating on the Web say that the NV35 will be utilizing a 256-bit memory bus and that should finally give the powerful GeForce FX GPU the breathing room it requires.
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