NVIDIA: Are you ready? >> 04:42 PM - Marcus Yam
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NVIDIA has posted this teaser page asking "Are you ready?"
Ironically, that's the very question we all want to ask of NVIDIA regarding the NV30.
The word on the street lately is that the almighty new part from NVIDIA will debut at Comdex this mid-November. But according to this ZDN article, the new graphics chip may not be readily available until next year, making a supposedly Fall product into a Spring product (by the famous six-month cycle).
Nvidia was expected to have its NV30 processor, to be sold as the GeForce 5, on the market by now. But problems stemming from shifting to a new chipmaking process have bumped back the chip by several months. Analysts now expect Nvidia to have a handful of new chips on the market by Christmas, but volume shipments won’t begin until early next year.
"Basically, they missed the cycle," Hans Mosesmann, a Prudential Securities analyst, said of Nvidia. "Really (the NV30) is a fall product that's now been pushed out for all intents and purposes to the spring."
Once NV30 products do appear, they’re likely to be 25 percent to 50 percent faster than the Radeon 9700--not enough of a boost to get people to switch, Mosesmann said. That's partly because many of the immediate advances expected in PC graphics depend on programming instructions built into DirectX 9, the upcoming version of Microsoft's PC graphics library. The Radeon 9700 was built to support those functions.
The NV30 "is a great product," Mosesmann said. "It's going to be better, but not good enough...It's going to have to be twice as fast as the 9700 for people to look at it and think about switching."
