Extra details of Nvidia GeForce FX card revealed

"WE ARE THE launch partner of Nvidia and we will bring you the new generation GeForce FX card", MSI said in a press release.

There's fierce compeititon amongst the Nvidia partners, and MSI is a big system builder and OEM launch partner, unlike Creative Labs, which is going for the retail market here in Europe.

MSI gave additional details about the NV30 technology which we haven't seen published elsewhere.

The well known facts are that the GeForce FX is made using a .13µ (micron) process, and uses DDR II memory working at 1GHz, while the GPU is clocked at 500MHz, has theoretical fill rates of four billion pixels per second and 16 billion anti-aliased samples per second. It also boasts programmable pixel and vertex shaders and the ability to render 128-bit color internally.

It also mentions the new colour compression called LightSpeed Memory Architecture which it boasts has more efficient bandwidth especially in anti-aliasing. There are two new modes of FSAA called 6XS made for Direct3d only and new 8X for both OpenGL and Direct3D.

MSI claims it is the number one Nvidia card partner worldwide, shipping five million units+ in 2001 and an estimateds 11 million units+ in 2002. Apart from that, it has some tier one OEM PC manufacturers, one of which, we believe is Dell. It claims it is the first company to exceed one million units/month in graphics card shipments and is the Nvidia reference card designer.

But here is the complete specification proposed by MSI:

GPU
0.13u Manufacturing Process
125 Million Transistors ( 2X GeForce 4)
256-Bit GPU
Flip-Chip BGA Package with copper interconnects
8 Pixel Per Clock (8 Pixel Pipelines)
1 TMU Per Pipe (16 Textures per unit)
> 500MHz Core Clock (will probably vary depending on model)
350 Million Triangles per Second - 3x The Geometry Performance of a GF4 Ti

Memory
Memory with >1GHz Data Rate (500MHz DDR)
128-Bit "DDRII" Type
128MB & 256MB Memory Capacity
3rd. Generation Lightspeed Memory Architecture
48GB/s Effective bandwidth through the use of compression techniques. (16GB/s actual @ 500MHz)

Other
Full DX9 Compliance (and more)
64-Bit Floating-Point Color
128-Bit Floating-Point Color
2 x 400MHz Internal RAMDACs
Supports for DX 9.0 Vertex Shader 2.0+
Supports for DX 9.0 Pixel Shader 2.0+
Unified Driver Architecture
DVD&HDTV-ready MPEG-2 decoding up to 1920X1080i resolutions
nView 2.0 - Multi-Display Technology Digital Vibrance Control 3.0
Video Mixing Reader(VMR) support
NVIDIAR Cg Compiler support
Cinematic Programmability for Amazing Visual Effects
Conditional Execution for both Pixel and Vertex

Creative Labs claims to have an exclusive retail arrangement for Europe, but MSI is going for the system builder market. µ

* MEANWHILE, Digitimes reports today that Nvidia has kept an eye on the production of the NV30 cards itself, writes Mike Magee. This squares with what we've heard separately. We have the definite impression here that Fox is producing 10,000 cards, and they're all very similar except that they'll obviously have different coolers and different boxes with different names surrounding them. Digitimes also reported that Nvidia will release NV31 and NV34 graphics cards in March and April.