If PC gamers and graphics buffs were jolted when former underdog ATI Technologies rocketed to the 3D speed crown with this summer's Radeon 9700 Pro, imagine how overdog Nvidia Corp. felt. Well, today the GeForce gang finally fired back with its long-awaited NV30 graphics processor -- or at least with the official name of the chip, GeForce FX, and news that the AGP 8X/DirectX 9.0 product is now sampling among card and desktop vendors, with retail product sales scheduled for February 2003.

The GeForce FX is based on what Nvidia calls CineFX architecture, for "cinematic-quality graphics and special effects in real time" -- going beyond mere speed, the company says, to enable "a new type of interactive expression" or deliver not only realistically rendered scenes but character emotion.

But in the absence (for now) of actual CineFX games, not to mention GeForce FX boards to play them on, enthusiasts are inevitably focusing on speeds and feeds -- and Nvidia is happy to oblige, describing an 0.13-micron-process chip with eight pixel pipelines and nearly twice as many transistors as the GeForce 4 (some 125 million), capable of pumping out 4 gigapixels per second -- easily topping the Radeon 9700 Pro's 2.6 gigapixels/sec, and also narrowly beating the latter's 15.6 billion antialiased samples per second.

Production GeForce FX chips, Nvidia promises, will run at approximately 500MHz to the ATI flagship's 325MHz. Geek-lust-galvanizing of all, it uses DDR-II memory running at 1GHz (not to mention a whopping forced-air cooling design that means cards based on Nvidia's reference design will fill not one but two motherboard slots).

You can find more detail on the GeForce FX's all-new Intellisample gamma-adjusted antialiasing and anisotropic filtering technology and 128-bit color precision in our hardcore sister site Sharky Extreme's preview, and teaser shots from several promised games -- from Legend Entertainment's Unreal II to UbiSoft's Splinter Cell and more -- at Nvidia's site. Obviously, hands-on, final-product testing and benchmarking is still some weeks away, though Nvidia says both graphics-card vendors like ASUS, Gainward, Leadtek, MSI, and PNY and high-performance PC builders like Alienware, CyberPower, Falcon Northwest, and VoodooPC have signed up to sell GeForce FX gear.

Will 2003 bring us a new framerate champion -- or, more important, cooler-looking, truly movie-quality games and other applications for desktop PCs? How will ATI respond -- with the DDR-II Radeon 9700 Pro it's already demonstrated, or something else? Stay tuned to Hardware Central and Sharky Extreme for all the news, and start saving your money in the meantime.