NVIDIA Manager Gives Fermi Interview

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NVIDIA’s Fermi-based GeForce 400 series of graphics cards are finally officially released (although most of us mere morals won’t be able to get our hands on them until NVIDIA goes into “general production” on April 12th), and at the PAX gaming show in Boston, website techReaction sat down at Bryan Del Rizzo, a NVIDIA manager, to chat with him about Fermi’s troubled past and its hopeful future.

The Fermi-based cards were delayed, delayed and delayed and regarding those delays, Del Rizzo explained that Fermi is a completely new chip architecture, built from the ground up for DirectX 11 support, vs. ‘attaching’ Dx11 functionality to an existing chip design. Del Rizzo said, “I mean, this is a chip that was designed from the ground up for DX11.  It wasn’t an after thought, we didn’t take our old architecture and just tack on DX11 and then just, you know, bring it to market. [...] It took us longer to get it to market than we expected [...] But sometimes the wait is worth it.”

Regarding the rumor that entry-level GeForce 400 series cards would be coming this summer, Del Rizzo said, “Well, actually there probably is because I think one of our executives in the financial offices said that you can expect other variants of the GeForce family sometime in the second half of this year.  So, based on what they said that probably is true.”

Last week, we reported that a dual-Fermi graphics card (like the current GTX 295) wouldn’t coming soon due to power requirements and an already tight supply on existing Fermi chips. Although nothing was confirmed, Del Rizzo hinted strongly that NVIDIA was working on such a product for the GTX 400 series. “But I have to kind of laugh because when we launched the GeForce GTX 285, there were a lot of rumors that said we couldn’t do a dual GPU product with that chip. [...] And of course we brought the GTX 295 to market; it did really well! So, if you look at the history of Nvidia, you can probably pretty much figure out what we’re going to do.”

So, that’s all but a confirmation that NVIDIA is working on a dual-Fermi card and seems that mid-range and entry-level GeForce 400 cards will be coming this summer.