DirectX 10 cards... WHEN?

[ibex333]

I tried to do a search on this, but I found nothing in particular to answer my question.
Does anyone know when will the DirectX 10 cards start appearing?

Your predictions:

1)How much will they cost when they come out.

2)Will they be compatible with current PCE-E motherborads like DFI Lanparty Ultra-D, or will they require a whole new PC??

 

[akugami]

This topic has been discussed many times before. No one knows when DX10 cards will be shipping. There are lots of guesses but no one at this time knows for sure. If they do, they're under NDA so it comes out to the same thing anyways as no one has that information.

Before you worry about pricing, understand that DirectX 10 requires Windows Vista in order to operate. If you do not have Vista, you will not be able to use DX10 even if your card supports DX10. The games should use a DX9 path instead. Windows Vista will not be available till early 2007 and there are talks of it getting delayed further to the second quarter of 2007. Basically even if DX10 cards came out today, and DX10 games came out today, it would still be a good 8+ months before you can enable DX10 features because Vista won't ship till Q1 2007 at the earliest.

As for your questions, it will cost about the same as how much the X1900 and 7900GTX cost when it came out. In the 500-600 range.

It will support current PCI-E motherboards if the motherboards. There is no reason to assume otherwise and there will be a lot of PO'ed motherboard customers calling out for blood as well. Depending on power draw the only thing it might require is a power supply upgrade if your current one is not up to snuff.

 

[ibex333]

Originally posted by: akugami
This topic has been discussed many times before.

I bet.

Still, thanx for taking the time to answer my questions. I feel like I understand this whole thing much better now.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: akugami
This topic has been discussed many times before. No one knows when DX10 cards will be shipping. There are lots of guesses but no one at this time knows for sure. If they do, they're under NDA so it comes out to the same thing anyways as no one has that information.

Before you worry about pricing, understand that DirectX 10 requires Windows Vista in order to operate. If you do not have Vista, you will not be able to use DX10 even if your card supports DX10. The games should use a DX9 path instead. Windows Vista will not be available till early 2007 and there are talks of it getting delayed further to the second quarter of 2007. Basically even if DX10 cards came out today, and DX10 games came out today, it would still be a good 8+ months before you can enable DX10 features because Vista won't ship till Q1 2007 at the earliest.

As for your questions, it will cost about the same as how much the X1900 and 7900GTX cost when it came out. In the 500-600 range.

It will support current PCI-E motherboards if the motherboards. There is no reason to assume otherwise and there will be a lot of PO'ed motherboard customers calling out for blood as well. Depending on power draw the only thing it might require is a power supply upgrade if your current one is not up to snuff.

DirectX10 isn't the only way to use the new feature set. OpenGL can be extended to support it too, though the odds of it being ready before Vista is low.

 

[Munky]

My best guess is that since Vista has been officially delayed to 2007, DX10 will be unusable until that time, so there's no point in releasing DX10 cards yet. DX10 cards will probably start appearing around Christmas 2006, unless there's another major delay of Vista.

 

[TanisHalfElven]

i have a question. i read about the unifed shader architecture and i fail to understand it. does having 40 unified shaders mean that they can al process server as vertex shaders and pixel pies or will it be allocated or how. anyone willing to explain ? thanks.

 

[IeraseU]

Later this year(Oct-Dec), expect R600 from ATI and G80 from Nvidia in limited quantities.

 

[Munky]

Unified shaders can do operations on both vertex and fragment data, so yes, it's like a combined vertex and pixel shader.