To: John Solder who wrote (13728 ) 7/15/1999 6:23:00 PM From: Patrick Grinsell Read Replies (3) | Respond to
I'm very surprised no one has commented on any of the information in that article I posted. Much of it hasn't been heard anywhere else. I'll post the relevant parts and maybe it will generate discussion.penstarsys.com This summer ATI is planning on releasing the Rage 128 Pro. This chip will have all the features of the original Rage 128 GL, but be clocked at 125 Mhz. Other optimizations in the design will supposedly give a 30% increase in performance over the Rage 128 GL. This chip is supposed to be announced in July, and shipping products made available in late August. [Also, I've been told performance will be just under Voodoo3/TNT2 levels.]Intel will eventually release a new chipset at the beginning of next year. It is unclear where this chipset will stand, but it is supposed to appeal to the performance section of the video community. The GX4 is basically a low-cost, SLI version of the Savage4 processor and will not show much if any performance increase over the current industry leaders (TnT2 Ultra and Voodoo 3 3000/3500). With two Savage4 processors on the chip, there will be a total of 4 texturing pipelines, but it is yet to be seen if this feature will add that much performance to the processor (the dual texturing pipeline nature of the Savag4 is not that impressive when compared to chipsets such as the Matrox G400, the TnT2, and the Voodoo3). Matrox is a little slower in developing chips than its rivals, but the chips it does produce are usually very good. Matrox will again have a new product out by this time next year, but Matrox keeps very tight-lipped about what it is developing. nVidia is doing the same thing with its next-gen product, the NV-10. Very little is known about this chip other than it will support onboard transform and lighting calculations. Reports have it that it is behind schedule and was originally supposed to be announced by early fall. It now looks like it will be announced sometime in December. Rumors state that it will have many advanced features including S3TC, environmental bump mapping, quad-texturing, and an advanced memory architecture that will support up to 256 MB of memory (OUCH!). It will be produced initially on the .25 micron process with speeds up to 200 Mhz, and will then be produced on the .18 micron process 6 to 8 months later with some optimizations (NV-11). This monster supposedly has over 15 million transistors. With this amount of transistors and the huge die size, it will cost a LOT of money and most likely require a lot of power, perhaps more than most AGP slots can give it. [This is the first I've heard of .25 micron...hmmm. Quad texture 200mhz=800 Mtexel. First solid numbers I've seen.] Rumor also has it that this chip is nearly ready. It was supposed to have been announced at E3, but with the delay of the nVidia NV-10, there was no need to release specs on this product and possibly hurt its sales of the Voodoo 3 series. Insiders say it was ready for an August/September release, but with no real competition, there was no need to release it on the expected date. Supposedly on August 2nd, 3dfx will be announcing "next-gen technology", whatever that means.
