nVidia aim the sword at ATi – In the Laptop departmen

The graphics card supports twelve pixel pipes, a programmable video processor, support for DirectX Shader Model 3, 2x memory bandwidth for DDR1 and 4x for DDR3. Not only that, but the laptop department is keeping inline with the desktops, and the GO graphics card is in a PCI-Express derivitave. Tasty!

The graphics core is directly based on the 6800 Desktop, using the NV40 chip – whats even better is its been given support for full customizing by manufactures, including alterations to take into account thermal dynamics.

For the mainstream user the card incorporates nVidias MXM graphics module system. This is marketed as ‘Pure-Video’. The idea of this is to provide acceleration for Hi-Definition MPEG2 Video and Hi-Definition Windows Media Video compressions – the idea of this is to allow the video formats to be resized without any distortion or banding, and to take load of the CPU during playback and processing.

So far the following companies have been given the go-ahead to take the baby on, Alienware, Eurocom, Sager, Falcon Northwest, Voodoo PC and Prostar.

However nVidia flattening ATi in this department so soon would be to boring would’nt it – so in the usual scheme of things ATi announches their plans for the Mobile Graphics department.

They plan to launch a card to take over from the Modile Radeon 9800, and will be in direct competition to the 6800. Currently the chip has the code name M28 – once again it will show in the PCI-Express form.

The card will use the chipset from the X600, however cleverly enough will utilse the instruction set from the X800. It has 12 Pixel-Pipelines, a core clock speed of 400Mhz, and is expected to be on par with the desktop model. Well, we have all heard that before. So watch that space.

ATi boldly claim it will sport a 3D Mark 2005 of 3850, which is meant to be 25% more then the 3005 of the 6800.

Both chips should be seen by Christmas.