Posted on Thursday, September 14 2006 @ 0:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The Inquirer has some more details about NVIDIA's upcoming G80 GPU:
Some people are saying that it will have 96 pipes, split as 48 DX9 pipes and 48 DX10. While this may sound like a huge number, we are told if this is the case, it is unlikely that you can use both at the same time. Think a 48 or 48 architecture. That said, I kind of doubt this rumor, it makes little sense.
In any case, NV is heavily downplaying the DX10 performance, instead shouting about DX9 to anyone who will listen. If the G80 is more or less two 7900s like we hear, it should do pretty well at DX9, but how it stacks up to R600 in DX9 is not known. R600 should annihilate it in DX10 benches though. We hear G80 has about 1/3 of it's die dedicated to DX10 functionality.
One of the other interesting points that surfaced is much more plausible but still odd, and that is memory width. As far as I know, GDDR3 is only available in 32-bit wide chips, same with the upcoming GDDR4. Early G80 boards are said to have 12 memory chips on them, a number that is not computer friendly.
More details over
here.
