I think you're overestimating the amount of transistors that has to be doubled. The B3D chips table says 190M for NV41 and 143 for NV43.Chalnoth said:1. I would expect both vertex and pixel pipeline counts to be doubled. That's most of the transistors in the chip. The only things that would remain the same are the video processor and I/O.
2. I wouldn't expect the chip to remain the same, but have some additional improvements....so maybe I misspoke in my previous post.
So, for my lower range I doubled the transistors of the NV40 and rounded it to 450M. Any extra would be related to other advancements, hence the upper range. So yes, I should have left out the "without improved tech," as I was obviously including it.
PS and VS pipelines are certainly a huge area, but VPU, memory interface, and early Z aren't insignificant either. Also, I think if they had had more time they could have made NV40 with less transistors. E.g. NV30 to NV35 is a surprisingly large change for the small increase of transistors. I think both NV30 and NV40 have a lot of "wasted" transistors, being the first incarnation of a new architecture.