In these days, the 3D market is seriosly to explode. Here is a little coverup of these days news:
STM:
In a few months a renovated KYRO II known as STG4800 is due to arrive. The new chip will be based on the same 0.18-micron technology as KYRO II (STG4500) and won't differ from it anyhow in architecture. At the same time, an improved manufacturing process of the new chip is supposed to help STM accelerate it till 200MHz. This way, in the nearest future we'll see a kind of KYRO II Ultra. The other graphics chip from STM will be a representative of the new PowerVR Series 4 family, STG5500. It feels like STM has refused to launch a chip code-named STG5000, which was mentioned in the company's earlier plans, and to replace it with the faster STG5500. It is promised that STG5500 (aka KYRO III) will be a tile based architecture chip, but its performance will be much higher than that of KYRO II. It will be achieved thanks to an upturn in the working frequency (up to 250-300MHz) and two more rendering pipelines introduced (KYRO II can boast only two pipelines). Furthermore, STG5500 will be equipped with a hardware T&L unit and will be built on the 0.13-micron technology. STG5500 based cards will supports up to 64MB of DDR SDRAM. The chip is scheduled for the end of 2001. The outlook for KYRO III is quite optimistic: it may become a serious competitor not only to GeForce3, but also to NVIDIA's next child. |
S3/Via:
S3 is soon to enter the Highend 3D accelerator market again. Presently it is busy developing a graphics core with a code name Columbia.
ATI: Ati is on their way with the next generation Radeon chip which will squize Nvidia furthermore.
Nvidia, you're not alone.
Update: Nvidia has at the moment some VERY unreasonable prices. I can remember when I bought my latest Voodoo2 monster from 3dfx for 275 dollars, at that time it was THE latest. In these days, the cheapest Geforce 3 is at priced at 450 - 475 dollars here in denmark. Indeed it's a good card, but it doesn't justify the price.
Source: Zyron
