If there’s any fanboy war as vicious as the one that rages between Sony and Microsoft, it’s the one that boils within the PC camp over graphics card manufacturers Nvidia and ATi.
Nvidia unleashed another salvo with the latest blast of details on their upcoming GF100 graphics processor. Based on the new “Fermi” architecture, the GF100 arranges 512 CUDA (compute unified device architecture) cores into four GPCs (Graphics Processing Clusters), each of which comes with four SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors), all packing the power of Nvidia’s PolyMorph Engine. All those acronyms amount to a 8X boost in power devoted to tessellation, the activity that lies at the heart of DirectX 11, which is the thing you need to have to run DiRT 2 and the new Aliens vs. Predator game at their maximum sexiness settings.
That all sounds great, and if all true will provide a considerable challenge to ATi’s 5000 series of cards currently on shelves. Unfortunately, Nvidia forgot to tell us how much all this graphical goodness is going to cost us, and exactly when we’ll have to pay for it.
Come on, Nvidia! Give us PC gamers a price point! We’ll need it when we have put together a list of parts that will totally outperform the consoles for pocket change, just to remind them that we’re superior.
Nvidia details GF100 graphics beastie [Channel Register]
[Image credit to Tomioka Jirou]
Published: Jan 19, 2010 08:30 pm