Microsoft clarify NV2A
We were right, as it happens...
Although we crudely called it the NV25 when we first heard about it a few weeks ago at nVidia's development conference in London, Seamus "Xbox" Buckley, speaking to the Game Developer's Conference in the States this week, has noted that the chip will be labelled NV2A (presumably to stress the similarities between it and the NV20- the last thing nVidia want is potential GeForce 3 buyers turning their noses up when the cards finally hit the shelves). According to CGO, the Xbox CPU will provide all memory access for the NV2A, although otherwise it's very similar to the NV20, as we suspected it would be. The NV20, or GeForce 3, has made its name with stunning visual quality and key new features like pixel and vertex shading. Seamus hinted to the GDC that the NV2A will arrive with unique Xbox features, but the inner workings aren't relevant to the press because it will never appear outside of an Xbox. What he would say was that it will push more polygons, something Computer Gaming Online attribute to its relative freedom from the DirectX 8 API - after all, on a closed platform Microsoft can feasibly do what they like to improve performance, as long as it works. Seamus also reckons that lots of small timing changes can be made- stuff they could never do in a PC. In the words of CGO, "Since they know the exact clock speed and bus width of both the CPU and memory, they can actually optimize the chip for those timings and see quite a significant performance increase." The Xbox is due to hit the States this year, and depending on all sorts of variables, and the Japanese problem, the rest of the world in early 2002. Related Feature - NVIDIA show off magic at The Gathering