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From both sides of the Atlantic, nVidia yesterday launched its next generation of graphics processor: here in Lodon and at the Comdex industry show in Las Vegas.

Rather than a small step forward to GeForce 5, the company is claiming a giant leap with the moniker GeForce FX.

The strapline to the new chip is 'the dawn of cinematic computing'. The company claims the GeForce FX to be able to render 3D graphics of the quality seen in feature films such as Toy Sotry, but in real-time. In real terms, this means being able to create 3D environments on the desktop of incredible realism and detail.

'Over the next five years we're going to bring graphics to a new level,' promised Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, speaking at the US launch. 'I think the real explosion will happen when these two industries [PC and cinema] come together,' he said.

The industry launch in London bore witness to a number of demonstrations of the chip's power: from specially staged pieces that highlighted the use of multiple textured layers to create ageing effects on a truck, to actual film footage crafted into 3D that retained the detail of, in this case, a dancing craggy-skinned ogre, and to games in development such as a first-person shooter called S.T.A.L.K.E.R that boasted impressive effects such as the play of light and shadow of sunlight filtered through cloud cover and then through a canopy of leaves.

Product line manager Geoff Ballew said, 'The GeForce FX marks the first product to combine the talents of the 3dfx and nVidia development teams.' Through benchmarks performed by the company, he reckoned the GeForce FX to offer

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on average 2.5 times the performance of the company's current top chip: the GeForce 4 Ti4600.

Even old games will enjoy faster speed, with the GeForce FX scoring 173.1 frames per second in Quake 3 at a 2,048 x 1,536 resolution. This compares to 93.9 from a GeForce4 Ti 4600.

The GeForce FX processor went through a number of changes in order to support such advances. Moving to a smaller manufacturing process (0.13micron as opposed to the current 0.15micron process) and copper interconnects on the 125 million transistors mean higher speeds. Along with eight pipelines, we're looking at a world's-fastest 500Mhz, and support for DDR2 memory of 1Ghz.

It also means lower power consumption but requires more attention to cooling - the cards we saw had some heavy duty fans and cooling systems. With this in mind, nVidia has come up with its patent-pending Silent Running technology that monitors heat and pipeline activity and dynamically adjusts the cooling. So if all you're doing is working on a Word document, Silent Running will cut the fan right back and let the heat sinks handle any heat output.

But don't get too excited just yet. nVidia have launched the chip, but boards sporting it aren't expected on the high street until February of next year. Ballew said they when they launch they will be aimed at the graphics 'enthusiast' and will be priced accordingly. In short, don't expect them to be cheap.

Furthermore, it will need application and games developers to produce the product that will take advatage of this technology. As with the advent of hardware transform and lighting, which first appeared in nVidia's GeForce 256 card, it took a little while for games developers to start producing games using it. So we may see something similar with the DirectX 9.0 compliant GeForce FX.

nVidia hopes to counter this by making the chip fully programmable, with a full instruction set and support for high-level languages that should allow fast development of products, limited only by the developer's imagination.

Mark Skeggs, general manager of EA Pacific, gave a demonstration of Command & Conquer Generals on the card, which is due for release in February 2003. Retail boards are expected in the same month.