ATI's R420 and Nvidia's NV40 to arrive next year

PERHAPS BECAUSE of a secret conclave that Nvidia and ATI conducted recently, both firms have decided to release their next generation products next year.

Whatever the truth of secret meetings between ATI/Nvidia and the like, it didn't sound realistic to many of us that they could release two high end products in just three months time, because when you introduce your next generation chip you can wave bye-bye to your previous products' sales.

Nvidia still has to introduce its NV38 -- that should happen next week with its 475MHz/950MHz overclocked core and memory but according to previous plans, the NV40 should have arrived just a few months after this one, late November as it was originally planned.

With both companies announcing or about to announce their current speed bumps, and knowing that a product needs to be out and for sale for around six months or so, it seems wise to assume that NV40 and R420 will be pushed into next year.

We can confirm that Radeon 9800XT and Geforce FX 5950 is the fastest you'll get this year, so your wallets are safe for a while.

ATI and Nvidia could never ship these chips in this calendar year and it was always planed to introduce the chips in January/February.

The Loki R420 chip that ATI wants to pitch against the NV40 as R400 was too "advanced" to compete with Nvidia NV40 will be a Spring chip just as NV40, so wait for the daffodils to burst through the verdant earth.

Who knows. Maybe Nvidia plans to introduce its card with Doom 3 and we already know that Doom 3 is scheduled for the 29th of March 2004.

We can safely assume that NV40 and R420, codenamed Loki will get into shops around Q2 2004 and that, oddly enough, fits in nicely with the CeBIT trade show. µ