Introduction

Many a bloody battle has been fought between pro-NVIDIA and pro-ATI supporters over which GPU is likely to win in the upcoming battle between the NVIDIA NV40 and ATI R420 GPUs. But no matter who wins those verbal battles, the time will come when the GPUs are pitted against each other and the final judgement delivered.

Right now, it looks like the NVIDIA NV40 will be the first to hit the market. NVIDIA is slated to launch the NV40 in a huge launch cum LAN party in San Francisco on the 13th of April. Just 12 days away!

Indeed, it is an important event. Not only for NVIDIA fans but also for NVIDIA itself. Under heavy assault by ATI's award-winning Radeon GPUs, NVIDIA needs the NV40 to be a real winner to breakaway from ATI's stranglehold.

Will NVIDIA succeed with the NV40? Or will it be reduced to playing second fiddle like its older brother, the NV35?

Although its superiority over ATI's upcoming R420 GPU can only be determined after ATI launches the R420, the NV40's launch on the 13th of April will give us a good idea of how well the NV40 performs.

But 12 days is still a VERY long way to go, isn't it?

Until then, the Internet will be rife with rumours and speculation over how powerful NVIDIA's new GPU will be. All sorts of people will come up with their own opinions or speculations. Again, friends will turn against friends, brothers will fight brothers as battles are fought over those rumours and speculations.

All that is really unnecessary though. Why?

Because we have just tested the new NVIDIA NV40 GPU!

An NVIDIA employee who naturally wishes to remain anonymous secretly slipped us a final revision engineering sample of the NV40 when he dropped by Malaysia on the way back to the States. Unfortunately, because the employee has to deliver this very sample back to NVIDIA headquarters, we did not have much time to test it.

However, I'm sure the benchmarks that we managed to run will be able to give you a very good idea of how well the NV40 will perform even BEFORE its launch in San Francisco!