Okay, a friend of mine -- owner of nvision.pl to be exact has just returned from CeBIT. Anyway, he talked to NVIDIA representatives and they told him NV40 will have support for 24-bit floating point precision amongst other things that were confirmed more or less. Below bit is translated (by me) from Polish:
"It's hard to get anything out of NVIDIA representatives. It is obvious they don't want to reveal any information about their next generation GPU. On the other hand, NV40 will premiere very soon and there is already a handful of information available. If you were to ask me about exact specs, I'd have to kill you. However I can always throw in some bits of information. It is worthy to look at current specifications (which were mentioned in our news section before) -- it is very similar to actual NV40 specs. NV40 will also sport hardware MPEG1 / MPEG2 / MPEG4 coding / decoding as well as support for 3D Shadows. NVIDIA has also reworked their 16-bit floating point precision usage -- FP16 and FP32 are said to work flawlessly now. Additionally NV40 will have FP24 support. The above information does look interesting. Did I mention, NVIDIA confirmed 16 pipeline architecture?"
While I talked to Polar about pipeline architecture, he could not confirm full 16 pipeline design. NVIDIA just told him it has 16 pipelines, they did not want to say more. Another important thing is that, NV40 will be widely available after the launch.
Now about R420. He also talked to ATI, but whenever he mentioned the chip, they started to talk about something else. One thing worthy to note is that new drivers will have a totally different look -- a more clean look. Also, ATI did not want to skip driver versions on purpose, someone just "messed it up" -- so no more skipping.
Please note that I did not say any of the above, so don't come after me. It's based on chat I've had with Polar.
"It's hard to get anything out of NVIDIA representatives. It is obvious they don't want to reveal any information about their next generation GPU. On the other hand, NV40 will premiere very soon and there is already a handful of information available. If you were to ask me about exact specs, I'd have to kill you. However I can always throw in some bits of information. It is worthy to look at current specifications (which were mentioned in our news section before) -- it is very similar to actual NV40 specs. NV40 will also sport hardware MPEG1 / MPEG2 / MPEG4 coding / decoding as well as support for 3D Shadows. NVIDIA has also reworked their 16-bit floating point precision usage -- FP16 and FP32 are said to work flawlessly now. Additionally NV40 will have FP24 support. The above information does look interesting. Did I mention, NVIDIA confirmed 16 pipeline architecture?"
While I talked to Polar about pipeline architecture, he could not confirm full 16 pipeline design. NVIDIA just told him it has 16 pipelines, they did not want to say more. Another important thing is that, NV40 will be widely available after the launch.
Now about R420. He also talked to ATI, but whenever he mentioned the chip, they started to talk about something else. One thing worthy to note is that new drivers will have a totally different look -- a more clean look. Also, ATI did not want to skip driver versions on purpose, someone just "messed it up" -- so no more skipping.
Please note that I did not say any of the above, so don't come after me. It's based on chat I've had with Polar.
