by Playfuls Staff |
2nd October 2006
According to an article posted on Digitimes.com, the world-wide leader in video processing capabilities Nvidia is expected to release in mid-November the next generation of GPUs.[more]
Code-named G80, the chip will be the brain of the next GeForce 8800 graphics card and will be DirectX 10-compliant. According to sources cited by Digitimes, the new graphics card should be out this November.
The success of the most advanced (until now) GPU depends largely on how well Windows Vista, Microsoft’s next-generation OS, will do on the market after its launch. Windows Vista will be the first OS in the history of the company to fully support DirectX 10 (which will be one of its main features), which brings a lot of improvements in the PC gaming world.
But anyone who plans to buy Direct X 10 hardware and plans to use its full potential will have to buy Vista as well.
The current driver model on the Windows XP is the limitation. One of the key points of Direct X 10 is to be the ability to have more independent objects and the current driver model on Windows XP simply won't be able to deal with it.
Direct X 10 hardware will of course run Direct X 9 games and it is also supposed to do so fast.
With Shader Model 4.0 support, DirectX 10 will improve visualization and rendering capabilities utilized in PC games, also reducing CPU overhead, according to the makers. It means that game developers will get additional space to make their games more sophisticated, said the graphic card makers.
They also expect ATI to lag behind Nvidia at releasing a DirectX 10-compliant GPU, just as they did with GPUs that supported Shader Model 3.0. ATI motivated the delay for Shader Model 3.0 support with the inexistence of enough games to sustain an investment in that domain (which is wrong since at that time Splinter Cell Chaos Theory was already announced with SM 3.0 features).
ATI on the other hand managed to boost its profits through the partnership it had signed with Microsoft to deliver the graphics chips for Xbox 360.
Since DirectX 10 is positioned as a Vista-only solution, with presumably no ability to work with previous Windows versions, Nvidia's move to launch the GeForce 8800 in November should rather be considered as a symbolic step, said industry sources. So far, Microsoft only promised that Windows Vista will run DirectX 9.0, allowing to later upgrade it to DirectX 10 via Windows Update, the sources indicated. When Microsoft releases a DirectX 10-capable OS, ATI will perhaps catch up with the competition, the sources added.
