In a special event on Tuesday night in San Francisco, Nvidia launched the GeForce 6800 series, its newest flagship graphics chip aimed at high-performance desktop computers. The new chips promise better performance and newer capabilities for gamers and others looking for the smoothest, most realistic 3D graphics.
Architectural improvements in the new chip include the implementation of a 16 pipeline architecture. The new chip features eight times the floating-point shader calculating ability, four times the shadow processing ability and double the vertex processing ability of the GeForce FX, Nvidia's current top-end desktop hardware.
The GeForce 6800 is designed for PCI Express interfaces and also offers full support for AGP 8x interfaces. It also supports GDDR3 memory, and features a 256-bit memory interface. The chip was manufactured using a 0.13 micron process technology.
Nvidia touts the GeForce 6800's support of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 1.5, giving a tangible improvement to games and applications on both Windows PCs and Macs.
Also new to this graphics chip is 32-bit shader precision, displacement mapping, geometry instancing and other features. Full floating-point support is provided through the entire rendering pipeline, and the chip also uses a new rotated-grid anti-aliasing feature and 16x anisotropic filtering. All this adds up to textures that are rendered onto three-dimensional objects much more clearly than previous chips, Nvidia claims.
The GeForce 6800 also features a programmable video engine that can be used for high-definition (HD) video playback. The video engine supports MPEG encode and decode, and integrates a TV encoder.
The first GeForce 6800 chips are already shipping to Nvidia's card manufacturing partners, OEMs, system builders and game developers. Nvidia anticipates that retail boards featuring the new graphics hardware will be released within 45 days.
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Full Version: Nvidia launches GeForce 6 chips
Yay!!! That is so sweet. 
Makers of 3D Chips Compete for Control in Real Time
Both Nvidia's new GeForce 6 family and ATI's new product which reports have said will be named Radeon X800, and which the company says will be announced soon and should be in the stores at roughly the same time as Nvidia's will have more than twice as many logic transistors as the current state-of-the-art Pentium chips.
Don't drag your feet. For a limited time, save up to 30% on select HP LaserJet and color LaserJet printers. Gain productivity, performance and reliability from these printers and realize instant savings of up to $280, or combine with HP Hot Deals and save up to $550. Start saving now.
So when Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia , was planning a new Silicon Valley headquarters here for his company, which makes the chips that display high-quality images on computer screens, he insisted that his architect connect all four of its three-story buildings by skybridges so that employees would not have to wait for elevators.
One reason Huang is in such a hurry these days is that Nvidia is being chased far more aggressively than ever before by its nearest competitor, ATI Technologies, based near Toronto.
In hopes of recapturing the clear advantage that it has let slip, Nvidia is counting on a new generation of its GeForce chips that it was to introduce on Wednesday.
Until last year, Nvidia was the overwhelming leader in making the chips that are used to improve the ability of personal computers to portray complex three-dimensional and fast-moving graphics images, a quality particularly prized by video game players. Moreover, it had an exclusive deal with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for the graphics processing chips used in the Xbox game machine.
That all came undone last year when Nvidia placed an ill-timed bet on a new generation of chip-making technology that reached the market too late. At the same time, Nvidia lost its Xbox contract to ATI after refusing to meet Microsoft's stringent pricing demands.
As a result, after growing at about 100 percent annually for four years, Nvidia's revenue fell to $1.82 billion in 2003 from $1.91 billion in 2002
ATI not only outperformed Nvidia they had a cheaper chip, said David Wu of Wedbush Morgan Securities.
Shares of Nvidia fell from a high of $71.71 in January 2002 to as low as $7.37 in October 2002. They have since climbed back to about $26.
It was a grim lesson for Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with two colleagues from Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) . At the time, there were no 3D games in the PC market, and no one was trying to use texture mapping, a technique for wrapping a digital image around an object to give it a more realistic appearance.
Now, with the rush to display high-quality digital images on items ranging from computer screens to cellphones, and the introduction of a generation of wide-screen digital televisions, most experts expect to see a new boom in graphics chips. David Orton, a veteran Silicon Valley technologist who is president of ATI, said: Look for new performance from us. We both want to grow the market through advances in 3D.
At the Heart of Computing
Those advances are increasingly putting makers of graphics chips at the heart of computing, demanding even more complex circuitry than that used in the central processing units that run all the basic operations of a PC. Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) , which dominates the market for central processing units, includes less advanced graphic capabilities in its Pentium chips.
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Both Nvidia's new GeForce 6 family and ATI's new product which reports have said will be named Radeon X800, and which the company says will be announced soon and should be in the stores at roughly the same time as Nvidia's will have more than twice as many logic transistors as the current state-of-the-art Pentium chips.
Don't drag your feet. For a limited time, save up to 30% on select HP LaserJet and color LaserJet printers. Gain productivity, performance and reliability from these printers and realize instant savings of up to $280, or combine with HP Hot Deals and save up to $550. Start saving now.
So when Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia , was planning a new Silicon Valley headquarters here for his company, which makes the chips that display high-quality images on computer screens, he insisted that his architect connect all four of its three-story buildings by skybridges so that employees would not have to wait for elevators.
One reason Huang is in such a hurry these days is that Nvidia is being chased far more aggressively than ever before by its nearest competitor, ATI Technologies, based near Toronto.
In hopes of recapturing the clear advantage that it has let slip, Nvidia is counting on a new generation of its GeForce chips that it was to introduce on Wednesday.
Until last year, Nvidia was the overwhelming leader in making the chips that are used to improve the ability of personal computers to portray complex three-dimensional and fast-moving graphics images, a quality particularly prized by video game players. Moreover, it had an exclusive deal with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for the graphics processing chips used in the Xbox game machine.
That all came undone last year when Nvidia placed an ill-timed bet on a new generation of chip-making technology that reached the market too late. At the same time, Nvidia lost its Xbox contract to ATI after refusing to meet Microsoft's stringent pricing demands.
As a result, after growing at about 100 percent annually for four years, Nvidia's revenue fell to $1.82 billion in 2003 from $1.91 billion in 2002
ATI not only outperformed Nvidia they had a cheaper chip, said David Wu of Wedbush Morgan Securities.
Shares of Nvidia fell from a high of $71.71 in January 2002 to as low as $7.37 in October 2002. They have since climbed back to about $26.
It was a grim lesson for Huang, who co-founded Nvidia in 1993 with two colleagues from Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) . At the time, there were no 3D games in the PC market, and no one was trying to use texture mapping, a technique for wrapping a digital image around an object to give it a more realistic appearance.
Now, with the rush to display high-quality digital images on items ranging from computer screens to cellphones, and the introduction of a generation of wide-screen digital televisions, most experts expect to see a new boom in graphics chips. David Orton, a veteran Silicon Valley technologist who is president of ATI, said: Look for new performance from us. We both want to grow the market through advances in 3D.
At the Heart of Computing
Those advances are increasingly putting makers of graphics chips at the heart of computing, demanding even more complex circuitry than that used in the central processing units that run all the basic operations of a PC. Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) , which dominates the market for central processing units, includes less advanced graphic capabilities in its Pentium chips.
Full Article
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