IT WON"T JUST BE CREATIVE that will have Nvidia GeForce FX (NV30) graphics cards out by the end of the month, according to reliable sources in the distribution channel. By the third week of January, distributors told the INQUIRER that a number of different vendors will have units up for sale, suggesting that silicon is stable.
Specifications of one card we"ve seen show it has full DirectX 9 support, 128/256MB of memory, 16GB/s bandwidth and a memory clock of 500MHz (1GHz DDR II) running at two nanoseconds, and rendering 350 million rather than the 325 million triangles of the Radeon 9700 Pro, just as we suspected and Nvidia hinted.
One distributor close to the manufacturers" plans said Club-3D would be one of the first off the block with an NV30 card, using dual 400MHz RAMDACs up to and including 2048 x 1536 pixels at 85Hz, integrated NTSC/PAL support, video mixing rendering, and support for dual link DVI.
But, he added, a whole bevy of other manufacturers are also expected to go live with NV30 boards in the third week of January. The operating systems supported will be Linux, the Macintosh OS, and a stack of Windows OSes including Win95 and WinME