Nvidia prepares to launch G84/86 around mid-April

WE MIGHT HAVE criticised AMD's decision to postpone the R600 launch, but it is no surprise that the delay has benefited its rival graphics chip firm as well.

Nvidia's driver team bought itself some extra time to develop the drivers for its upcoming G8 and G86 implementations.

The company decided to skip CeBIT altogether, which is odd. Nvidia was famous for parties in the Munchner Halle, but for this year, this will be canned. The new launch date is currently floating around April 17th or 18th, which is just in time for certain DirectX 10 game to appear, at least in a form of playable demo.

Just as a quick reminder, Nvidia's GeForce 8600 is based on the G84 chip - built on 80nm TSMC process. This chip sports 64 scalar shaders, or exactly half the number of the excellent G80 chip. Being pin-to-pin compatible with GeForce 6600 and 7600, it uses the same memory controller. The chip will be combined with either 256MB or 512MB of GDDR3 memory. The fastest card, the 8600GTS is clocked at around 700MHz for GPU and 1GHz DDR for the memory (2GHz effective), yielding in 32GB/s of available bandwidth.

The recommended price is expected to be 50-100 dollars below the current entry-level DX10 board, the Geforce 8800GTS 320MB.

Expect to need one 6-pin PCIe power connector in order to provide enough juice and this product will mark the end of the era in which only high-end GPUs needed external power connector.

The GeForce 8600GT has the CPU and memory clocks tuned back some. The 600/1400 combination should do well in the mainstream, given a price tag below 180 dollars ($140-170 has always been price bracket of the lower-clocked mainstream chip).

The third product is the interesting 8500 series. This is actually a castrated G84 chip with 48 Scalar Shaders instead of 64 and a clock of only 450MHz for the core and 800MHz DDR2 memory (same as you can get on DDR2-800 modules). This product will also be available in a passively cooled version - price will be set between 80 and 100 dollars (formerly occupied by 7300GT).

G86 will only come at the end of Q2, in the form of GeForce 8300 - which will replace the 7300GS. Do not expect to pay more than $50 for the card.

We have mentioned 512MB memory, but the products with 512MB memory will be more a checkbox feature than one officially supported by Nvidia. Graphzilla is offering 256MB GDDR3 memory to its partners, while it is up to partners to decide if they want to combine the G84 GPU with something else.

It seems to us that 8500GT is the most obvious candidate for 512MB of DDR2 memory and touting the product as "world's first mainstream DirectX 10 GPU with 512MB of RAM". But, then again, this is only a hunch. µ