Nvidia’s 6200 AGP to come

“ WE HEARD that Nvidia plans to bring all of the Geforce six series back to AGP. Nvidia wants to make Shader 3.0 available for all of its customers as many of them still have AGP systems.

The company is working on a printed circuit board (PCB) that will enable its customers to make 6200 AGP cards. Of course this card will be powered with the BR2, HSI chip which translates PCIe commands to AGP and vice versa.

We are not sure when these cards are going to be ready but 6600GT AGP cards are already available and 6600 standard AGP are expected shortly.

We are quite sure that those cards won’t use Turbo Cache as the AGP interface is one way only and it’s not wide enough for all of the data. This leaves Nvidia and its partners with two options. To base 6200 AGP on NV43-V chips used in 6200 standard or to base them on NV44 cards used in 6200TC.

This will put some additional pressure on ATI, as it still does not support Shader model 3.0. We know that ATI will chose the same path from R520 to all other future products but Nvidia definitely have lead over the competition as it complete generation weather we are talking about PCIe or AGP cards. ATI bridge chip is still not ready but it should be toward the middle of Q1 2005.”