On top of this, I just read some interesting info about the upcoming Nvidia cards:
"Nvidia G80 will make ATI stumble on April. Sources from anonymous mentioned that since the introduction of NV40 which was a very big leap over the defective NV30 with its spectacular features such as Shader Model 3.0 and SLI, in the next couple of months after G71 you will be promised to witness another new spectacular technology that will be brought by Nvidia to 3D Gaming community. It's been almost a year since Nvidia has not really altered much of its architecture just like what we see now in the G70, An increase in pipelines,the intro of MIMD and more vertex units. This is because Nvidia knows that ATI is currently having a hard time fixing and improving their bugged R5xx architecture so it isn't necessary for Nvidia to introduce an incredibly improved architecture. This is what you will see in G71, there will be 32pipes, increase in ROPs and a little speed bump over the coreclock, it is more like an absolute ultra pumped NV40based architecture. In the G80 however, Quad SLI it self can be implemented on a single card with two chips solution because it will carry the first dual core GPU ever with the support of DirectX10 and Shader Model 4.0. The development of G80 is also mentioned as being running very intensive since Nvidia's acquisition over ULi."
" * 65nm
* 64 Shader pipelines (Vec4+Scalar)
* 32 TMU's
* 32 ROPs
* 128 Shader Operations per Cycle
* 800MHz Core
* 102.4 billion shader ops/sec
* 512GFLOPs for the shaders
* 2 Billion triangles/sec
* 25.6 Gpixels/Gtexels/sec
* 256-bit 512MB 1.8GHz GDDR4 Memory
* 57.6 GB/sec Bandwidth (at 1.8GHz)
* WGF2.0 Unified Shader "
While this is an undoubetly biased article, there is alot of truth here. If those specs are correct, this thng is going to dominate. If this thing works as anticipated then ATI is in trouble...they need to fix their product and stop worrying about getting a few more MHz in their cards to beat out Nvidia's last gen cards. The only drawback is that I'm guessing this thing will cost you an arm + leg + torso when first released.
I still have some faith left in ATI, they just need to debug their products before they release them!
VR-Zone article
Edited by S.W.A.T. 2.0, 02 February 2006 - 06:53 PM.
