NVIDIA Corporation gave a sneak peak today the industry’s first fully-integrated lineup of reference graphics cards capable of working with PCI Express bus. As reported, NVIDIA uses its current generation processors along with a special chip to allow the GeForce FX family of GPUs working with forthcoming graphics line.

NVIDIA said its GeForce FX PCX solutions are designed to take full advantage of the additional bandwidth and features that this new I/O interconnection standard delivers. By using an innovative PCI Express (PCX) high-speed interconnect (HSI), a complex piece of networking technology that performs seamless, bi-directional interconnect protocol conversion at incredible speed lines, NVIDIA can transform its current award-winning GeForce FX series into a full-family of PCI Express GPUs.

“By aligning ourselves closely with Intel and helping define this new specification, we were able to engineer an innovative protocol engine, in HSI, that delivers the full-PCI Express feature set without any compromises. HSI and PCI Express will enable a new level of performance for high bandwidth applications like graphics and networking,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA

The new product family includes:

• NVIDIA GeForce PCX 5950 – GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics processor with PCI Express bridge;
• NVIDIA GeForce PCX 5750 – GeForce FX 5700 Ultra graphics processor with PCI Express bridge;
• NVIDIA GeForce PCX 5300 – GeForce FX 5200 Ultra graphics processor with PCI Express bridge;
• NVIDIA GeForce PCX 4300 – GeForce4 MX graphics processor with PCI Express bridge;

In addition, last week in Taipei, Taiwan, NVIDIA validated its family of GeForce PCX products with the industry’s top mainboard, chipset, and BIOS vendors. NVIDIA has already shipped more than 1000 PCI Express boards to customers and partners.

By qualifying a single unified device, NVIDIA partners can launch and be the first to validate, launch and market an entire family of PCI Express solutions. Products based on this new design are expected to become available in the second half of 2004 from NVIDIA’s partners.