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GeForce 4 To Be Announced Feb. 5

Time: 13:21 EST/18:21 GMT | News Source: ExtremeTech | Posted By: Julien Jay

Nvidia Corp. will announce its next-generation desktop graphics chip, which may be known as the GeForce4, in early February. Officials at Nvidia, Santa Clara, Calif., told ExtremeTech Thursday that the graphics chip code-named "NV25" will be formally announced on Feb. 5, along with a desktop version of the NV17, a chip that was previously released as a mobile-only product. Sources said the NV25 was originally scheduled to debut at the Consumer Electronics Show next week in Las Vegas, confirming a separate report by Taiwan wire Digitimes. The reasons for the rescheduling of the launch were not known.

The spokesman for the company declined to discuss the features of the new chip, or whether it would actually be called the GeForce4. However, observers said the chip will probably be branded as the next generation of the GeForce line, in part because the chip is being released a little less than a year after the GeForce3 was launched in late February 2001. Nvidia already released an incremental improvement to the GeForce3 and GeForce2 line in October, dubbed the Titanium series, which features faster core and memory clocks than the original versions.

Several reports on the capabilities of the NV25 have already been published, most believing the chip will feature six pixel processing pipelines versus the four used by the GeForce3. The reports also suggest that the NV25 will feature significantly higher clock rates, faster memory interfaces, and improved antialiasing capabilities. The Nvidia spokesman declined to comment on any of the features of the new chip. Nvidia will also release a desktop version of the NV17-M, a hybrid GeForce2-GeForce3 graphics processor that was first introduced at the Fall Comdex show in November in Las Vegas, according to the spokesman. That chip, which featured a 250-MHz clock rate vs. the 143-MHz core clock rate of the earlier GeForce2Go, will be featured in desktop PCs as well. In November, Nvidia said that the NV-17M would appear in notebook PCs beginning in the first quarter of 2002. The approximate pricing of NV25-based cards and additional features of the new chips will be announced at the launch on Feb. 5.