Nvidia's 90nm G71 graphics chip, possibly planned to ship as the GeForce 7900 GTX, will not launch until March.

So claims website Hexus.net, at any rate, citing whispers heard during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week. According to the report, the chip will contain 32 pixel-processing pipelines in a core clocked at 700-750MHz. The GDDR 3 memory will run at 800-900MHz (1.6-1.8GHz, effective).

The site's moles point out that the new part will deliver significantly better graphics performance than the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 - to match the older part's performance, the G71 would only need to be clocked to 430MHz, apparently.

Nvidia is said to have begun sampling the G71, but it appears the part won't ship in boards until the launch, currently pegged for CeBIT, which runs from 9-15 March. That's the best part of two months after ATI is expected to announce its next-generation part, the R580 - aka the Radeon X1900 - in late January.

Whether the chip ships then remains to be seen, however. Either way, it's expected to feature 48 pixel-processing pipelines and be clocked at around 650-700MHz. Like all X1000-series chips, the X1900 will support DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0 and ATI's 40-bit video processing system, Avivo. ®