Crowd control, rumor control .. Inquirer is speculating again. The new high-end model from NVIDIA which until today I figured would be codenamed G80 might just be called G71. NVIDIA's latest graphic offering should start sampling as soon as next week. We also heard that ATI is prepping the new high-end R580 based solution pretty soon. And for thos that do not know: G71/R580 are the chip development codenames.
It's all in the promises now but we have a reason to believe that Nvidia is on the schedule with this one. We also heard that the chip should work around 700 MHz frequency and as we reported before it should feature 32 pixel pipelines.
Nvidia scheduled its launch and world wide availability in stores for February 2006 but if all goes well it might actually launch at the same time as ATI, in the last week of January.
Guru3D.com ImageNvidia sounded happy about 90 nanometre marchitecture and it thinks that its yields are good but we still have to see to believe. ATI is shipping thousands or R520 based cards and they are all available while Nvidia still struggles to ship any of its ghost Geforce 7800 GTX 512 cards. They are still on hold and it sounds quite dead to us as in three weeks Nvidia plans to release even faster card that should come in the same price range and it should cost roughly the same, at least we hope it should cost the same.
The biggest mystery now is what is faster 32 real pipelines raw brute force or the rumored 48 pixel shaders from ATI, we guess both Nvidia and ATI's approaches will have its positive and negative effects. We expect that Nvidia will win some of the benchmarks with its G71 while ATI will win some with R580, Radeon X1900XT.
And you figured your GeForce 7800 GTX or Radeon X1800 XT was fast enough eh ? Exciting times for sure though !