NVIDIA REALLY needed to pull the cat out of the bag in the next round of its increasingly epic battle with ATI Technologies and from where we're sitting we'd be more than surprised if the next round isn't, now, a foregone conclusion. US sources close to Nvidia have confirmed that their next generation GPU will feature a full sixteen pipelines – not as previously speculated an 8x2 arrangement - and this is reflected in the increased transistor count of circa 205-210 million, up from a previously speculated 175 million.
In very recent times ATI have been extremely confident in saying that their R420 - set to launch not long after, Nvidia show their hand – would, immaterial of architecture, thoroughly outgun the NV40. Indeed today, Richard Huddy - ATI's European Developer Relations Manager maintained that their expectation was for ATi's R420 to be, faster, on balance, across a suite of 10 common games than Nvidia NV40.
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News source: The Inq