Nvidia's long awaited NV40 graphics processor will ship as the GeForce FX 6000 series next April or May following a March unveiling, German web site 3DCenter claims.

The 130nm chip will actually use an AGP 8x interface. For video memory, DDR, GDDR 2 and GDDR 3 will all be supported. The GPU itself will contain 175 million transistors, the report says. It's unsure about clock speeds, but suggests 500-600MHz for the core, 600-800MHz for the memory.

As for its feature set, the site's summary list pretty much what you might expect from a next-gen Nvidia part: better anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering; version 3.0 pixel and vertex shader support but with improved shading engines; eight rendering pipelines with two texture mapping units each, together capable of 16 passes without z values. The chip will support DirectX 9.0, not 9.1.

NV40 is expected to be accompanied by the NV41, which enables PCI Express support. PCI Express-enabled versions of Nvidia's 5700 and 5200 are likely to surface soon after. ®