NVIDIA Corp. seems to be close to launching its new GeForce 7800-series graphics product, as graphics cards makers are reported to receive commercial graphics cards featuring the chip code-named G70 in a couple of weeks.

A number of NVIDIA’s closest partners have been given G70 designs to show off at Computex, according to a report from AnandTech web-site. The article suggests that the first graphics cards, that are likely to be officially branded as GeForce 7800-series, would be in hands of graphics cards makers by the second week of June. Despite of saying that “only a handful of NVIDIA’s partners” have received G70 graphics cards to demonstrate behind closed doors at the show, the web-site predicts “widespread availability” of NVIDIA’s next-generation graphics processor “very soon”.

NVIDIA GeForce 7800-series PCI Express graphics card features single-slot cooling solution and general design of its print-circuit board seems to be rather simplistic, which is positive for graphics cards manufacturers. NVIDIA’s G70 chip marked as “G70 NPB” that exists in engineering samples is rather big and is packaged in Korea. It is unclear when was the G70 chip taped out.

NVIDIA GeForce 7800 graphics processor is expected to feature 24 pixel and 8 vertex pipelines and to operate at 430MHz, HKEPC web-site recently informed. Some sources suggest that it would be made using 0.11 micron process technology at TSMC. By contrast, NVIDIA’s present top-of-the-range chip GeForce 6800 Ultra is manufactured at IBM’s facility in East Fishkill, NY, using 0.13 micron fabrication process.

It is unknown whether the G70-series of the graphics processing units will get any feature-set upgrade compared to the GeForce 6800-series that supports Shader Model 3.0. It remains to be seen whether the G70 is to be called NVIDIA GeForce 7 or receive a different brand-name.

NVIDIA also demonstrated its G70 graphics processor at the E3 show in mid-May, 2005, in the USA.

NVIDIA did not comment on the news-story.