Tuesday, April 21st 2009
ATI Months Ahead of NVIDIA with DirectX 11 GPU Schedule?
Never in recent times have we seen NVIDIA and ATI locked in such fierce market competition. The two are seen exchanging blows with product launches and price-cuts. ATI looks to be in the mood to take this competition to the next-level: DirectX 11 compliant GPUs. Microsoft has already released DirectX 11 with the pre-release versions of Windows 7 operating system. A recent report by Heise Online indicates that AMD will be ready with an ATI RV870, the company's first DirectX 11 GPU by the end of July, or early August.
Another source, The Inquirer, states NVIDIA's GT300 GPU launch for October. If you were to count these claims, AMD is put two to three months ahead of NVIDIA when it comes to time-to-market introduction of a new GPU generation. Now, whether you have DirectX 11 compliant software that makes use of the new technology available that soon is a different thing altogether. This will determine the practicality of a DirectX 11 GPU in July/August.
Sources:
X-bit Labs, Heise Online, The Inquirer
Another source, The Inquirer, states NVIDIA's GT300 GPU launch for October. If you were to count these claims, AMD is put two to three months ahead of NVIDIA when it comes to time-to-market introduction of a new GPU generation. Now, whether you have DirectX 11 compliant software that makes use of the new technology available that soon is a different thing altogether. This will determine the practicality of a DirectX 11 GPU in July/August.
83 Comments on ATI Months Ahead of NVIDIA with DirectX 11 GPU Schedule?
its going to be easier to code for, so the same fail wont happen again.
From what iv'e gathered in this thread and researching it, they'er going to make it so any card can run a DX11 game - they automatically just disable features you dont support (think very high greyed out in DX9 in crysis)
ms has a weird prosess for developing stuff sometimes they endup totaly re-thinking a product and yet keeping the same name, win7 if based off xp/2k (older the longhorn/vista) it wouldn't use a similar/nearly identical driver model to vista.
What i understand happened was that they desired they wanted to change directions for security and how the os works internally to be more unix like, this slowed dev on blackcomb/vienna down, but insted of renaming the orignal project they just "Branched" vista off to get something done quicker(look at the ammount of stuff that was removed to get vista out when it came out, like winfs)
vista isnt a newer code base then win7, its part of 7's evolution, look at the windows version numbers for evidance of this.
windows 7
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7
build 6.1.7000(higher when it comes out but 7000 is what most people have AFIK)
windows server 2008
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows#Windows_Server_2008
build 6.0.6002
vista sp1 and up use the same code base/kernal version as server 2008
if 7 was a new/diffrent code base it wouldnt share the same numbering scheme as older windows versions
oh and for a little extra info
windows nt 4.0=nt 4.0(cant remmber extended build number of the last build of nt4)
windows 2000=nt 5.0.3700.6690
windows xp=nt 5.1.2600.5512
windows 2003=nt 5.2.3790.3959
trying to say any of these os's isnt based on the older one is silly, as is saying any version with a lower/older build number is "newer" then later build numbers, i remmber hearing about "blackcomb" back in the windows 2k days, god that was a long time ago, i think blackcomb and vienna stick out in peoples minds and sound cool, and thats part of why the names leaked so early.
ms has a few times started projects to slim windows up, but has alwase ended up abandoning them because it breaks compatibility with to many older apps and would take more resources to add that compatibility back to the core os, and MS will NEVER do a split with older windows app support like apple did with osx vs os9 one of ms's biggist selling points for buisness is that they can hold onto the same apps and hardware an insainly long ammount of time without having to replace anything.
as we all know, this effects the home user market as well, alot of people dont ever want to have to buy a new webcam, scaner, printer, or hell in many cases even crappy old software, i know people who still run office 95/97 dispite the fact that they are horribly out dated, when you try and get them to upgrade they dont wana spent the money, when you offer openoffice or the like, they dont wana bother because its to much work to learn where the buttons are(or some such excuse)
I think with the next big windows(after 7) ms may get smart and go minwin style and do lagacy app support via a virtual machien and allow people to just download/install prebuilt virtual machiens with older windows versions on them, so the person can just install their old apps on the windows they where built for without having to have support for said apps as a core part of the os(it would remove alot of old lagacy code and thus bugs/slowdowns if they get out the ancient app support wouldnt it?)
blah, you got me to make another huge post!!!!(see what happens when you get me talking about something im intrested in?)
now I am just hoping the ogl3 hits soon and we can see some compitition, as i understand it ogl is also trying to move along the same lines, making things easyer for programers, the one BIG thing ogl brings is that its NOT MS so it can run on ANY OS, also alot of things can be run in software mode, where older dx versions you cant run much in software mode :/
What I would like to see microshaft do is move to a unix based OS and then have virtual machines to run the NT based programs sorta like wine but with Microsoft support and kernel engineering. Apple has done it why not MS? Everyone knows the NT kernel is a piece anyway.
Vista was meant to come out earlier than it did, but beacuse it hit delays (cough, 90% of PC's on the market having no 3D acceleration) its closer to 7 than it should have been.
vista pre sp2 was bad, but IMHO xp pre sp2 was bad, and still isnt an os i would personally consider installing for my own use.
some of the stuff ms removed like classic start menu really annoys sysadmin types like myself who really dont like, having to install 3rd party apps to get back a simlar function to what we prefer to deal with is not going to get us to move to a new os.
the performance difference was SMALL and in-fact didnt do much at all, since 2k8 dosnt got the excess services that vista has by default i dont gotta disable/tweak as many services.
basickly i see server 2008 sp2 as being greater then windows7, even the non-public beta/rc versions i have downloaded weren't any better, and infact didnt give me back what I need to really make the os a joy to use.
blah, wish ms would just dump most of the legacy code and add it back via virtual machiens...also allowing custom gui's would be nice(like windowblinds/talisman/astonshell)