The upcoming NV30 from NVIDIA, which is to be promoted as a solution offering "Real Time Cinematic Rendering" is expected to be not just a new chip. NV30 architecture including fully programmable Pixel and Vertex shaders 2.0 will give birth to the whole bunch of the new GPUs targeted for different market segments.

The launching of NV30 scheduled for Q4 2002 will not be accompanies by the Value products announcements. While NV30 will be an expensive enthusiast solution, mainstream and value sectors will be left for GeForce4 and GeForce4 MX. However, they will be surely replaced with the solutions based on the new architecture within H1 2003.

NVIDIA is expected to announce new mainstream NV30 solution in Q1 2003, aka NV31. This chip is supposed to be based on the NV30 architecture, though it will be cheaper because of fewer rendering pipelines (their number will be reduced from 8 to 4) and narrower memory bus (128bit instead of 256bit). NV31 is also likely to undergo some other changes compared to NV30. By the way, NVIDIA is going to base its new notebook solution exactly on NV31.

Later in 2003, they will also release one more chip, NV30’s successor. This will be a budget solution with even simpler architecture than that of NV3. The similar graphics core will later on fit into the new nForce chipset.

These are NVIDIA’s plans for the H1 2003. And in H2 2003 we expect NV35, another high-performance 3D graphics accelerator for enthusiasts to come.