According to some sources, graphics cards based on the new NVIDIA GeForce3 chip won’t start selling earlier than in mid-April. Cards manufacturers have long ago got hold of the final version of the design. They say that the problem is the chip itself. Namely, like any complicated microchip with 57 mln transistors, has inevitably suffered from bugs. As it is reported, the first versions of the chip had troubles with textures compression. That’s why NVIDIA was forced to introduce several out-of-plan revisions before letting the chip out to the buyers.
The current revision of GeForce3 has the revision number of A5 and it is not supposed to be the last one. The final A6 revision will start shipping to graphics cards manufacturers in the second week of April.
At last, despite the chip with new architecture was delayed for half a year, NVIDIA didn’t manage to fit the time limits and announced the new chip one and a half months earlier than it could actually start shipping it. Nevertheless, NVIDIA will suffer no after-effects of this delay, as soon as nowadays there are no competitors to its elder chips.