3Dlabs/Creative

I stopped by the Creative stand as Tasha Davey, the PR manager for 3Dlabs, was in attendance and it would be a good opportunity to catch up on things 3Dlabs related. Sadly, there was not too much to be said at the moment though.

3Dlabs have recently launched an updated version of WildCat VP. They have taken the fastest variant of the Wildcat VP series and equipped it with a vast, 512MB Frame Buffer RAM. They are aiming this for the DCC markets – those who will either need very large display frame buffers and/or large quantities of texture storage for fast retrieval.

I attempted to tease a few details from Tasha about 3Dlabs next development, P20, but obviously none were forthcoming, save for the hint that 3Dlabs were currently aiming for the end of the year for its release.

While at the Creative booth I sought out some information on their consumer 3D line. I was told that Creative will be likely to ship the FX 5200 and 5600 boards in Europe as soon as possible, but will now forgo the FX 5800 series. Initially Creative was set to be the European launch partner but as the product slipped later and later, they decided against shipping it at all. One of the reasons cited for not shipping this was that the Creative brand was synonymous with excellent PC audio, and the noise that the NV30’s fan mechanism makes would not gel well with that image.

I also asked about Creative’s ‘Picture Perfect’ products, the first of their own 3D boards based on a 3Dlabs processor. It would appear that Creative US will be taking up on this product, with a scheduled release later this month, but it’s unclear if Creative Europe will at this point.

SiS

  I had a brief chat with Larry Lee at the SiS booth to discuss their upcoming 3D products, following on from the Xabre 400/600 series. As has been mentioned at Beyond3D before, XabreII will have full DX9 support and will be based on a 130nm silicon process. SiS have currently documented two versions of XabreII, a high end product with 8 pixel pipes and a lower end product with 4. Interestingly, though, it was said to me that each of the pixel processing pipes would feature two texture units, resulting in the high end product being able to take 16 texture samples per clock – it will be interesting to see if this is actually the case once we hear a little more of it. Oddly, outside of this meeting I also heard some talk of a 12 pipelined solution as well.

SiS expect to be sampling XabreII in May, which is likely to result in the release of these products in Q3 ’03 at the earliest.

NVIDIA

Naturally, the NVIDIA stand was very busy with all the representatives fully booked up with meetings. Not expecting to be at CeBit until a few days before I hadn't booked anything prior to my arrival. However, while Marco did not seem to be hugely impressed with the NVIDIA booth I had a different perspective, mainly because I quietly slooped off to the upper meeting level while no one was looking...

Once upstairs, I sought out Adam Foat so that we could go over a few details of NVIDIA forthcoming products. Whilst up there Andrew Humber joined us and we ‘shot the breeze’ for a while over the current happenings in the industry and all the recently launched products. I also managed to wear Adam down to the point where he handed me one of the few reference NV31’s they had on hand at the show, which we’ll be taking a look at in an upcoming preview.

I took some of the time I had available at the show to visit a few of NVIDIA’s board vendors, who naturally were all keen to show off the new FX series. While the FX boards aren’t quite available for purchase yet, the GeForce4 series are getting long in the tooth and there’s only so much you can do with this line now.

Gainward showed me their low end, entry level GeForce FX 5200, with passive cooling, an FX 5600 class product, and their version of the 5800 Ultra, with a mindbogglingly large array of bundled extras. Gainward will still be opting for a 2 slot solution for the FX 5800 Ultra, but in this instance it will be drawing air from the inside of the case and expelling it out, which means that at least this solution will not be dumping more hot air into the case, as is the situation with NVIDIA’s reference solution. Gainward also had a water cooled 5800 on hand, built by the guys at Bit-Tech, which although was just a bit of fun, the results showed that there may be some mileage in actually marketing such a solution.

Earlier that day NVIDIA had a Press Conference for new product announcements in the form of GeForce Go5200 and Go5600, the mobile variants of NV34 and NV31. Sadly I was on the plane to the show when this was occurring, so I was unable to attend; however I’d been passed the details of the new products a few days before. Seeing as we haven’t covered these products yet, we’ll take a closer look at them here...