What's coming from Nvidia next?

[Ryan Norton]

I did a bit of searching here at AT, Daily Tech, the enquirer.com and couldn't find too much on next gen Nvidia GPUs. I saw a reference to GDDR4, Directx 10, etc. in a forum somewhere but no launch date or anything. Situation is, I just bought a 7800GTX from EVGA and have a step-up window lasting until June 10. I'm trying to decide whether to just go 7900GTX or wait until whatever new comes out. Any good links? Thanks!

Alright, apologies, just found this post
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=31&threadid=1781807&enterthread=y
and other info on G80.

 

[Jazzatola]

Check out the roadmap at http://www.mikeshardware.co.uk

 

[Conky]

8 card SLI? :laugh:

 

[tuteja1986]

sli is getting out of control. Graphic card will soon become like ram slot :! it will be soon like "OMG ... you need 1GB extra of video ram... i recommend buy 2x 8600GT ... blah blah "

 

[obeseotron]

The next chip from nVidia is codenamed G80. It's a DirectX10 chip supporting unified shaders up to SM4, at least from the software's perspective, it may actually retain specialized shaders in hardware, while obscurring that from the software people. nVidia people have consistently downplayed unified shaders in hardware, so I think they proably are keeping them seperate. Probably out in time for Vista, but not before. Anything more this is pretty much pure speculation. As for GDDR4, that's not really nvidia's choice to make, both they and ati choose memory based on the memory available to them when they launch a card, not usually technical limitations. If GDDR4 is available, it will probably be used.

Edit: One thing that is known about DX10 is that they are doing away with partial compliance, and what's known as capability bits. This means it is an all or nothing proposition, you either support everything or it's not a DX10 chip. This is a good thing because it presents a fixed target for developers to write to, without worrying about various feature sets when designing their games. Personally, I'm riding an AGP 6800GT until DX10 chips are out from ATI and nVidia, because I feel like it will be a big deal.

 

[Ryan Norton]

Cool. Many thanks guys. My internet skills were off this morning when I couldn't find anything... I'm nto going to count on G80 cards being available by June 9 so I'm going to get in the queue for a 7900GTX super OC leet LOL roflcopter card or whatever theyr'e called.