NVIDIA’s Chief Executive Officer – Jen Hsun Huang – told analysts during the company’s most recent quarter financial results that the firm was planning to unleash its new mainstream GeForce 6-series graphics processor in a few days.

“At Quakecon in Texas […] we will officially unveil our newest mainstream member of the GeForce 6 family. This mainstream GeForce 6 will be the only Shader Model 3.0 GPU in its class and deliver performance well-beyond that of the competition,” Jen Hsun Huang said during the conference call with the analysts.

The mainstream member of the GeForce 6 family is expected to be the chip code-named NV43. Chinese web-sites call the product as the GeForce 6600.

“PCI Express support in native and AGP support will be provide through HSI,” Mr. Huang added.

Quakecon will be held from August 12 to August 15, 2004, in Grapevine, Texas.

The GeForce 6600 graphics processing unit is likely to contain 8 or 12 pixel pipelines and offer slightly lower performance compared to today’s GeForce 6800 GPU. At this point it is not clear how many versions of the NV43 will be available. Nowadays Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA tends to make three flavours of each of its GPUs to better correspond to needs of various customers. Chinese web-site MyHard.com reports that NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line GeForce 6600 flavour will have chip clocked at 425MHz and 256-bit DDR memory clocked at 900MHz.

It is not clear where NVIDIA makes its NV43 graphics processing unit: at TSMC using 0.11 micron fabrication process, or at IBM, using its 0.13 micron process technology.

In mid-June some sources in Asia said graphics cards makers were testing the forthcoming GeForce 6600 visual processing unit.

NVIDIA did not commented on specifications and product name of the mainstream GeForce 6 graphics processing unit.