Nvidia will ship native PCI Express successors to its current PCX 5900, 5750 and 5300 during the second half of the year. But it will continue to offer high-end AGP 8x parts right through Q1 2005.
So
says Chinese website MyHard.com, which claims to have seen the graphics chip company's internal roadmaps and based its own charts upon them.
At the high end, Nvidia will released NV48e later this year, building PCI Express into its DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0 GeForce 6800 core. The roadmap list a PCX 6850 part shipping in H1 2004 - an AGP 6800 with a PCI Express bridge - so either Nvidia has delayed it, with a possible knock-on effect on the release of NV48e, or MyHard.com's source roadmap is a little out of date. It certainly doesn't appear to have shipped yet, and we're already in H2 2004, just about.
Ditto the PCX 5550, an updated version of the current PCX 5300 - it too is listed as making a H1 2004 debut, but there's no mention of it on Nvidia's own web site. The leaked roadmap reckons it will be followed by a native PCI Express part, NV44, in H2 2004. It also names the PCX 5750 and 5900's successor as NV43, even though that part appeared on Nvidia roadmaps almost a year ago as a mainstream part - a successor to the FX 5200 - due H1 2004.
Both NV43 and NV44 will be Shader Model 3.0 parts, according to the report.
Nvidia will continue to roll out AGP 8x parts: NV48 at the high end, succeeding the current 6800 line and the FX 5900XT. The NV43 turns up again on the AGP roadmap - the other version should be the NV43e perhaps - as the follow-on to the FX 5700 and FX 5700 Ultra. The FX 5700LE will continue through 2004, to be succeeded in H1 2005 by NV44, as per the PCX 5550, above. NV44 will form the basis for the FX 5500's successor, too.
Beyond DX9 Shader Model 3.0 and bus support, the report provides no specifications for the new parts.
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