"WE ARE THE launch partner of Nvidia and we will bring you the new generation GeForce FX card", MSI said in a press release. There"s fierce compeititon amongst the Nvidia partners, and MSI is a big system builder and OEM launch partner, unlike Creative Labs, which is going for the retail market here in Europe.
MSI gave additional details about the NV30 technology which we haven"t seen published elsewhere. The well known facts are that the GeForce FX is made using a .13µ (micron) process, and uses DDR II memory working at 1GHz, while the GPU is clocked at 500MHz, has theoretical fill rates of four billion pixels per second and 16 billion anti-aliased samples per second. It also boasts programmable pixel and vertex shaders and the ability to render 128-bit color internally. It also mentions the new colour compression called LightSpeed Memory Architecture which it boasts has more efficient bandwidth especially in anti-aliasing. There are two new modes of FSAA called 6XS made for Direct3d only and new 8X for both OpenGL and Direct3D.
MSI claims it is the number one Nvidia card partner worldwide, shipping five million units+ in 2001 and an estimateds 11 million units+ in 2002. Apart from that, it has some tier one OEM PC manufacturers, one of which, we believe is Dell. It claims it is the first company to exceed one million units/month in graphics card shipments and is the Nvidia reference card designer.