nVidia ship new MX chips
Are the market leaders rattled by the announcement of Radeon VE?
As we reported this morning, ATI have just launched a budget graphics chipset to rival nVidia's GeForce 2 MX line. Is it any surprise then, that nVidia has chosen just thise opportunity to launch its MX-200 and MX-400 chips? Shyeah. The GeForce 2 MX features TwinView display modes for multiple monitors, but lacks the onboard DVD playback functionality of its competitor. It performs somewhere in-between the GeForce SDR and DDR levels, and the new MX-200 and MX-400 should raise the bar a little in that respect. Stripping the GeForce 2 MX down even further (and presumably therefore the price), the MX-200 features a rather pitiful and performance-choking memory bandwidth of 1.3Gb/second, but matches the original MX for fill rate and includes 32Mb of onboard memory. The MX-400 operates at 2.7Gb/second memory bandwidth wise, the same as the original MX, and beats it for fill rate by 50 pixels/second and 100 texels/second. It ships in 32Mb and 64Mb flavours. Certainly not as feature-laden as the Radeon VE, the MX line does address plenty of price pockets, and should wage a costly war on ATI in that department. One should fully expect to see the Radeon VE beating the MX-400 on the testbed but perhaps failing to beat it off the shelves. After all, ATI has not long been associated with ground-breaking 3D performance. Thanks to nVidia's Interactive website, you can see the GeForce 2 MX in action, so to speak. The site also offers you the chance to learn more about the company's Shading Rasterizer (or NSR). Related Feature - Hercules Prophet 2 MX