Nvidia claims the NV40 is 16x1, 32x0

READY TO BE confused about the NV40 and its infamous pipelines again? If so, sit yourself down, bare your left breast, and prepare to be bemused.

Even though we believe what we wrote here about the famous pipelines, it is only fair to give Nvidia's side of the coin.

What Nvidia said more then once to its loyal NDA (non disclosure agreement) press is that its chip uses 16x1, 32x0 approach. This is why all of them have the general feeling that Nvidia will win this round of the graphics wars.

This means that Nvidia can officially claim that its NV40 chip has 16 pipelines that can process one texture per clock which would pretty much mean that it will beat the R420 12x1 design.

Nvidia also claims as much as 32x0, perhaps producing the ability of the NV40 to render pixels without Color or Z value that will be very important in Doom 3 and games that use this engine.

I just cannot figure how you can put 16 real pipelines in a chip that is around 70 per cent bigger than the NV30 which eventually had only 4x2 marchitecture. A 70 per cent larger die implies that you could double your pipeline count but not quad it.

Let's hope that Nvidia's story is the right one but we won't know until someone who has cards plays around and discovers how this thing actually works.

However this turns out, I suggest that fastest card for Doom 3 will be NV40 because of its pipeline number and what Nvidia calls 32x0 and what we call 16x0.

NV30 taught me to be sceptical about Nvidia claims since our developer friends could easily find out how many textures you get each pass, not a hard thing to do.

Time will tell as in less than three weeks NV40 will get its final shape. µ