NV 30 "30% faster" than Radeon 9700 Pro

WE EXPECT NVIDIA TO not only present the NV28M but probably also the NV30 at Comdex next week.

If you remember, Nvidia decided to opt for a .13Âµ (micron) process but faced some obstacles because shrinking the die and increasing the frequency greater than 400MHz is technically tough. 0.15Âµ marchitecture with its aluminum interconnections is limited to 400 MHz while Nvidia plans to clock its chips at over 400 MHz and even to 500MHz. Will it get to 500MHz? It will have a nice old try.

Nvidia will use DDR II memory running at 500MHz or 1GHz effective that will be the fastest memory used so far in this type of semiconductor, as we reported before. The NV30 chip will feature eight pipelines and two TMUs – that's one more than ATI – and this will give it quite a boost since it will be able to render 16 textures per pass. We can also confirm that with 1.0 GHz data rate plus Lightspeed Memory Architecture 3, a card will be able to reach an amazng 48 GB/s, double what the Radeon 9700 PRO can do with its DDR 256 bit memory. Remember Nvidia will use 128 bit memory this time and will save its breath for 256 bit DDR II for future designs.

As for anti-aliasing, you will be able to use FSAA 8X now and anisotropic filtering will go up to 128 tap anisotropic filtering

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