Introduction
Top to bottom, baby! We were promised top to bottom GeForce 6-series hardware by the end of 2004, encompassing the high-end, mid-range and low-end market segments (with a fair amount of cross over at the boundaries) by NVIDIA at NV40's launch. NV40, launched in April, was followed by NV43 in September to let 6600 in the mid-range join 6800 at the high-end. Then in October came something of a curiosity.I'm still not entirely sure if NVIDIA was just covering its arse with GeForce 6200's initial launch, being based on NV43 again as it was, just with a pixel quad masked and disabled by the card's BIOS. Whether not confident they'd get out another discrete piece of silicon before 2005, breaking their promise, or for some other reason, GeForce 6200 initially made its debut using NV43.
Things change today, NVIDIA somewhat re-launching GeForce 6200 using a brand new GPU and some new ideas about budget graphics processing. As is usual with new GPU launches these days, most of the information I'll present to you is out there already prior to NDA lifting, and indeed at the time of writing it doesn't look like I'll make NDA expiry anyway, but I can still do my best to explain it outside of the, mostly accurate, rumours floating about.
So, there's a new GPU? Indeed, let's talk a bit about NV44.
