Many were expecting NVIDIA to take the wraps off of the NV36 and NV38 parts at Computex, but in fact not a whole lot was mentioned about them. There were samples being shown at Computex, but none of them were running, and none of them benchmarked. It now appears that the release will probably happen soon, but I can't say when exactly (within the next 2 months obviously). There are some things that we can probably gather about the design of these products, and a few that we can guess on. The most likely piece of technology at work here is that the NV38 and NV36 will most likely be the first products based on the IBM/LowK 130 nm process, and the first NVIDIA chips to come out of the East Fishkill Fab in New York. These should run faster than the TSMC fabricated parts, and probably produce significantly less heat per MHz. Of course, with the design of the new cooler on the NV38 samples shown, it will be running at a very high speed, and produce a goodly amount of heat. If I were a betting man, I would guess the clockspeed for both parts would be in the 550 MHz to 600 MHz range for the Ultra editions. Considering that the NV30 from TSMC ran at 500 MHz, this is not a wild guess.
There are also some indications that these parts could well be redesigned enough to partially make up the performance discrepancy between NVIDIA parts and ATI parts. The NV30 was well underway and nearly finalized when the DX9 standard was agreed upon. NVIDIA originally went at DX9 alone, and thought it may be able to force Microsoft to make its own design the basis for DX9. During the initial stages of DX9 development, NVIDIA removed itself from the group developing the technology standard. Only when DX9 was far into the development stages did NVIDIA rejoin the group. By then DX9 was nearly finalized, and ATI had a very good idea what it would be like (and had been working on the R300 core since the basic inception of DX9). NVIDIA was left with an underperforming part in floating point fragment programs, and they knew it. The NV35 development showed that NVIDIA did realize it made some significant mistakes with the NV30, and the NV35 was designed to work around those problems. NVIDIA is a smart company, and when the final specifications for DX9 were made official, NVIDIA knew they would run into problems in the future. This was over 1.5 years ago, and during that time design changes to the NV36 and NV38 could be implemented to help this situation. My belief (and it is only a belief) is that the NV36 and NV38 parts will be much better PS 2.0 performers than the NV30, NV31, NV34, and NV35 parts. I do not believe that NVIDIA had enough time to change around the entire design to be as fast as ATI's R3xx series in such situations, but I believe that the new parts will at least be a lot more competitive using standard ARB code paths for Pixel Shader 2.0 operations. This is only speculation, but some evidence pointing to this does appear to be out there. In the meantime NVIDIA is doing major damage control with their products and the apparent lack of performance in PS 2.0 operations. This damage control includes heavy driver and compiler level optimizations, working with developers to implement more NV3X friendly code, and keeping reviewers stocked with FX based cards to keep the good word out. I could be very wrong here and the NV36 and NV38 parts are merely speed upgrades, but NVIDIA is due for a major product design change this fall. It could be that the FX 5950 is merely named so as to confuse the competition, and in fact NVIDIA will release a major new part. I guess we shall see.
The one thing we can bet on is that the NV40 will not have the problems the NV3x series has now. PS 2.0 performance problems will be a thing of the past with the NV40, as it is supposed to have PS/VS 3.0 hardware. Memory bandwidth will also not be a problem as GDDR3 will be available in late Q1 2004, and that promises around 51 GB/sec bandwidth on a 256 bit bus. The NV40 is starting to look like the answer to NVIDIA's problems as of late. ATI is also very far along with the R420, but it may not be as advanced architecturally as the NV40. Still, not enough is known about either part to give further insight. Needless to say, 2004 looks to be more competitive than 2003 was.
