As always, it will be hot at CeBIT Hannover, the world’s biggest and most essential tradeshow for information and telecommunications technology, this year, as a lot of companies will demonstrate their new and exciting products. The market of discrete graphics solutions narrows, but the competition in the sector raises. Just weeks after NVIDIA’s partners will start to sell the first GeForce FX powered graphics cards, ATI plans to unveil its high-end code-named R350 and mainstream RV350 graphics processors. Moreover, SiS will increase the pressure on the low-end and mainstream market segments by announcing the Xabre II VPU. NVIDIA will also bring a graphics chip code-named NV31 that is it substitute the GeForce4 Titanium series of GPUs in their price-ranges.

ATI’s R350 graphics processor is based on the R300 architecture, but with certain optimisations that allow higher core-clock speed. According to unofficial information, the R350 VPU incorporates eight rendering pipelines with two texture units per pipeline. Graphics cards powered by the R350 VPU will be equipped with DDR-II memory with 256-bit bus. Actual products powered by the upcoming processor will appear in April 2003. What is very interesting to note is that according to some sources, the R350 chip, just as the RV350, will be made using 0.13 micron fabrication process! RV350 VPU is said to be the next-generation mainstream offering and will also based on the R300 architecture, but with lower manufacturing costs. RV350-based products will hit the stores this Spring. More information is available here and here.

The NV31 is expected to utilise numerous technologies introduced in the GeForce FX VPU and also offer comparable performance to the GeForce4 Titanium series, but with possible improvements in antialiasing and anisotropic filtering speed. Generally speaking, the NV31 code-named products will compete with the RADEON 9500 PRO and 9700-based solutions, so, it is very logically for them to be cheap enough. According to our sources, some DirectX 9.0 features will not be supported in hardware by the NV31 and NV34 chips (see this news-story).

SiS’ Xabre II VPU supports the DirectX 9.0 features, however, currently there are very few details available about the newcomer: by now SiS only declared 8 rendering pipelines as well as Vertex Shaders 2.0 and Pixel Shaders 2.0 support.

This year will definitely become a very interesting one, as numerous suppliers of graphics solutions will finally introduce something really competitive. Besides the companies mentioned above we should remember about S3 Graphics and 3Dlabs, who also roll-out their new products this year.

PS. And do not forget about the dying Matrox Graphics...