Well, it looks like now I can share some information about the timeframes of announcement and availability of the code-named NV30 graphics processor from NVIDIA. As far as I understood from our sources, the Santa-Clara based GPU developer will unveil its highly-anticipated chip at Comdex Fall. Keeping in mind that they plan to start selling the graphics cards by the Christmas holiday season, the actual products based on the latest VPU should start selling right after the announcement. Comdex Fall will take its place in Las Vegas from 18 to 22 November, so, it seems to be the right timeframe and place for the announcement.

Remember that NVIDIA NV30 features 8 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs on each one, DirectX 9 support, 256-bit DDR SDRAM memory, AGP 8x and a lot more technical innovations. I would like to point out that some Pixel and Vertex Shader features NV30 can offer are even better than provided by the target DirectX 9 platform. Additionally, the next-generation VPU from NVIDIA offers some very efficient memory controller to provide even higher memory bandwidth compared to the rivals and predecessors.

Keeping in mind that DirectX 9 and NV30 schedules are aligned, we can expect the new API from Microsoft to become available by the end of November. I also want to remind you that NVIDIA plans to launch their NV18 and NV28 this Fall, I believe they will announce these GPUs later this month or in early October.