Çıktı çıkacak diye beklenen NV20 hakkında biraz bilgi. NV20’nin çıkış tarihi ile ilgili çok konuşulsada şuan en mantıklı tarih Şubat 2001 gibi gözüküyor.
- Core frequency: 300MHz.
- Memory frequency: 500MHz. Graphics cards based on NV20 will be equipped with the memory chips from Samsung and Infinion, because these companies can boast the fastest DDR SDRAM chips.
- Manufacturing technology: 0.15 micron. The chips will be manufactured by TSMC.
- Amount of transistors: 50 million. It is twice as much as by GeForce2 GTS and 8 million transistors more than in Pentium 4.
- 4 rendering pipelines. NVIDIA seems to be increasing the speed of its upcoming product not by introducing more rendering pipelines but by optimizing memory requests, which is the today’s bottleneck of all classical graphics accelerators.
- 3 texturing units per pipeline. This is very similar to ATI RADEON. NVIDIA is probably expecting new games to come out, which will lay three textures over one pixel simultaneously.
- DirectX 8.0 compatible geometric co-processor.
- Curved surfaces and 3D-textures hardware support.
- Hidden Surface Remove (HSR) support: this is a z-buffer algorithm, which allows to reduce the memory bus workload, because it eliminated the need to texture hidden surfaces.
- Heat dissipation: around 15W. This is quite a lot for a graphics accelerator. That’s why new cooler construction may be required.