Although ATI RADEON 9700 was unveiled on the 18th of July, we still have no graphics cards based on the famous code-named R300 chip in stores. As far as I know, these days the biggest retail shops in the USA and Canada are preparing to start their sales and they definitely will in a week or so. However, there is a problem for ATI here. Firstly, they do not have a lot of RADEON 9700 powered graphics cards available, secondly, as I have read over The Inquirer, they are afraid that NVIDIA may paper-launch its long-awaited NV30 chip in the first half of September (say, the 9th) so to prepare the customers for it, affecting RADEON 9700 sales.

According to certain sources who are familiar with NVIDIA, its plans and current situation, the company only managed to tape-out the NV30 sometimes in mid-August. Assuming that this was the final revision of this highly-anticipated VPU, we can expect the company has started offering it for the graphics card makers by now. However, we should remember that NVIDIA also has NV18 and NV28, updated with AGP 8x support versions of the GeForce4 MX and GeForce4 Ti accordingly. If the Santa-Clara based graphics chip developer wants to make a big hype regarding those two, we will not see NV30 for a while. We should understand that NVIDIA does not have any simplified versions of their latest innovation and hence will use their already old GeForce4 line for making money in low-end and mainstream sectors of the market. As a result, we can expect all three graphics chips to be launched together. Taking into account the fact that there is “back-to-school” season coming and a lot of not expensive graphics cards are bought by OEMs and system integrators, NVIDIA`s primary target is to launch the updated versions of the current line in order to fulfil this rising demand.

A couple of days ago, I heard that NVIDIA ordered TSMC tens of thousands wafers for its graphics processors. It usually takes a number of weeks to make the wafers, separate the cores and pack them into plastic to get a chip. If NVIDIA made the order last week, we may expect the boards based on the GPUs in production to hit retail in October. I doubt that the NV30 chips were ordered; as too little time passed since the tape-out, the company will definitely want to double-check their high-end next-generation VPU and maybe even optimise it in order to get higher yields.

All in all, we do not expect to see the NV30 before the very end of October or even Comdex Fall in retail. Nevertheless, it is quite possible that they will make a “paper launch” in September so to make the computer geeks to target on the NV30 rather that on the RADEON 9700.