The “Break it Down” Blog

Wow… DigiTimes is reporting (via Engadget) that NVIDIA isn’t planning on releasing it’s revised GeForce 9 series cards until February ‘08 with the initial D9E high-end card, and then rounding out the offering with value parts in June. While not much is known at this point what the new cards will bring, a few goodies did get out:

• 65-nanometer manufacturing
• DirectX 10.1 Support
• Shader Model 4.1 Support

The real perks of DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 seem to be the following, from what I’ve seen online:

• TextureCube Arrays which are dynamically indexable in shader code.
• An updated shader model (shader model 4.1).
• The ability to select the MSAA sample pattern for a resource from a palette of patterns, and retrieve the corresponding sample positions. The ability to render to block-compressed textures.
• More flexibility with respect to copying of resources.
• Support for blending on all unorm and snorm formats.

And from the comments I’ve seen from DX 10 devs before, it’s not meant to replace DX 10 or revolutionize it, but rather to complete it or round it out more effectively; but it will require a hardware upgrade to support it, it can’t be done in drivers.
Is AMD and ATI really doing so little to challenge NVIDIA that their October ‘06 release of the 8800 series cards was so superior they have gone from a 6-month release cycle to a year-and-a-quarter release cycle almost? That’s just nuts.

Certainly the 8800 seems to be an excellent card with the new 8800 GT proving to be an unbeatable combination of price and performance, but that sure had longer legs under it than I thought… combined with AMD and ATI seemingly at a complete stand still as far as responses go to both Intel and NVIDIA.

ATI hasn’t announced or released a new card with fan-fair for what seems like ever now. I wouldn’t mind getting some competition back in the market here and going back to 6-month release cycles… those were exciting times.

Let’s hope that the 9-series is another deal-killer like the 8-series was, more or less trumping the previous generation by a 2x speed up in performance.

When you combine this news, with the news that Intel won’t be releasing value-Penryns until Jan-March of next year, the real sure-fire upgrade time slot is starting to look like next summer… and we just started into fall. I hate waiting