NVIDIA GeForce4 - NV17 and NV25 Come to Life

We've said it countless times before, there's generally a lot that happens behind the scenes at AnandTech that we can't always publish. Whether it is involving large-cache CPUs that never made it to mass production or the GeForce4 that was demonstrated last November behind closed doors, there are some things that must go unsaid until the time is right. Luckily for us, today we're able to talk about an egg we've been sitting on for a few months now.

You have to give credit where it's due and in this case the recipients should be NVIDIA's very talented group of engineers. They have consistently been producing new graphics parts in record times; NVIDIA was so ahead of schedule in fact that they could have released their newest GPU, the NV25, last December. The Santa Clara based company was on track to release the NV25 in December but held off in order to prevent cannibalizing sales of their GeForce3 line that was doing so very well.

More recently you've undoubtedly noticed the apparent lack of GeForce3 Ti 500 cards in the market. Board manufacturers have been complaining about Ti 500 chip shortages and even AMD had problems outfitting their last run of high-performance test systems with GeForce3 Ti 500 cards. It's no coincidence that the GeForce3 Ti 500 has been slowly fading away and it just happens to be near the release of NVIDIA's next-generation graphics cores.

Earlier this week ATI announced that they would be producing Radeon 8500 and 8500LE based cards with 128MB frame buffers, and later in this review you'll see exactly how this ties into NVIDIA's plans for the coming months.

And now to today's introductions; as you've undoubtedly heard if you've been reading the news, today NVIDIA is releasing two new lines of desktop GPUs - the GeForce4 Titanium line and the GeForce4 MX line. On the mobile side, NVIDIA will also be introducing the GeForce4 Go mobile GPU line.

In many ways this introduction is highly reminiscent of the launch of Intel's Pentium III three years ago. There will be much controversy over whether this new line of GPUs is deserving of a new name based on their improvements, that's just one of the many things we'll be tackling in this review.