X-bit labs

CeBIT 2003 Coverage. Part 1 (page 7)

Category: Editorial

by Anna Filatova

[ 03/14/2003 | 11:31 AM ]

However, despite these evident drawbacks, NVIDIA is still quite heated. Being encouraged by the indisputable progress made by its direct competitor, ATI Company, NVIDIA probably tried to aim a great blow at the rival with the help of NV30, but they missed. As I have already mentioned, the product appeared not very successful, to put it mildly, and not free from a number of not very nice drawbacks. It looks as if the roots of the problems lie with the memory controller: having used a pretty new and not very widely spread DDR-II memory, the company overestimated its powers and failed to use the bandwidth of the new memory bus efficiently. They also didn’t cope with the heat dissipation problem, because the current memory chips cooling proved insufficient. As I managed to find out, the solution to this problem hasn’t yet been found, that is why NVIDIA seems to be about to put the failed sensation into oblivion as soon as possible and to offer a new product. Yes! According to one pretty reliable source, the company is going to introduce a new NV35 solution, and not some time later, but this spring! It is a different question if they will really do it or not, or if they overestimated their abilities for the second time. However, the intentions are there, no doubt. Especially taking into account that the working sample of this product already exists and so far it made a very favourable impression.

This time the company decided not to use the brand new DDR-II and to return to DDR-I memory. NV35 will have a 256bit memory bus, and the working frequencies of the chip and memory will be lower than those of the current NV30. However, nevertheless, the performance promises to be considerably higher. For example, in Quake3 Arena game (timedemo1, 1280x1024) the performance difference between NV35 and NV30 made over 70%! Hm.. If we add here an enhanced anisotropic filtering unit and improved anti-aliasing quality, we will get a real tidbit. The only thing which will remain the same is the size of the card with the cooling system installed: the graphics cards based on this chip will still occupy the room of two PCI slots.

Of course, if we try to be realistic in our estimates, I believe this product will hardly be ready by the fall, and the cards based on it may come to the market closer to Q4 at the earliest. So, I wouldn’t be too excited about it. And can you imagine what happens to the sales of the super-expensive products based on the today’s NV30 if the company really decides to launch the new chip in spring? Of course, the sales will freeze! But these are just my suppositions. So, let’s wait until the new evidence appears, before we make final conclusions.

Well, and to conclude with, I would like to say a few words about one more graphics chip developer, SiS Company. This year, and to be more exact in the end of May, we will be able to see a new generation of SiS graphics solutions aka Xabre-II. These will be SiS340 (8 rendering pipelines, 350MHz+ chip frequency and 500MHz DDR-II memory, DirectX9, AGP 8x) and its “lite” version, SiS341 (4 rendering pipelines). Strange as it might seem but these solutions are positioned as competitors to the today’s leaders: ATI RADEON 9800 and NVIDIA NV30/NV31. Frankly speaking, keeping in mind the company’s previous experience in the graphics industry, it is hard to believe that the new products will be able to compete for the leadership. However, if we give up stereotypes, then you would agree, that it is not bad at all to an alternative to RADEON 9800 or NV30 for only $150 :)

I will keep telling you about other events at CeBIT, so please stay tuned!