NVIDIA plans GeForce GTX for June 18th with PhysX?
updated 01:10 am EDT, Thu May 22, 2008
NVIDIA GeForce GTX coming?
NVIDIA plans on refreshing its GPU line-up next month with two new graphics card that will feature its next-generation CUDA-enabled graphics core, codenamed D10U. The company is expected to deliver both the GeForce GTX 260 (D10U-20) and GeForce GTX 280 (D10U-30) on June 18th as part of its summer refresh, according to DailyTech. The report claims that the GTX 260 will be a "significantly" scaled down version of the GTX 280, which will enable all 240 unified stream processors designed into the processor. These second-generation unified shaders perform 50 percent better than the shaders than its previous-generation offering, the company claims in its documentation; however, the new NVIDIA cards will only support GDDR3 memory and DirectX 10, while AMD focuses on faster GDDR5-based cards due early this summer.
The new cards, however, will be NVIDIA's first attempt at incorporating the PhysX stream engine (which it acquired earlier this year), but the report said that further information on support was not available. The PhysX technology, promised by NVIDIA in all CUDA-enabled processors, is currently in use in many Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii games, as well as many gaming PCs.
Like the expected GeForce 9900 flagship series, the lower-end "crippled" GTX 260 features only 192 stream processors, about 20 percent fewer than the GTX 280. Also, while the GTX 280 ships with a 512-bit memory bus capable of supporting 1GB GDDR3 memory, the GTX 260 only has has a 448-bit bus with support for 896MB of memory.
Both cards will support PCIe 2.0, OpenGL 2.1, SLI and PureVideoHD, the same features found in the NVIDIA's GeForce 9800GTX, which leaked in March and released in early April. In addition, the cards will support two SLI-risers for 3-way SLI support, allowing as many as three cards to accelerate the 3D in a single window for compatible games.
