Nvidia Unveils New-Generation GPU News

GPU developers Nvidia have today unveiled their â??New-Generationâ?? model of GeForce graphics card, which promises to obliterate all of its predecessors. In designing the new GPU, christened the GeForce 7800 GTX from the earlier codename â??G70â??, Nvidia completed redesigned the architecture allowing for a number of achievements to be made including:

• Totally new programmable shader architecture, with more than twice the shading horsepower of the previous generation.
• Film-quality, high dynamic-range lighting support
• Second-generation Nvidia SLI technology.
• Second-generation Nvidia PureVideo technology, for home-cinema quality video on the PC.
• Release 75 of the Nvidia ForceWare driver, for improved SLI performance with support for the latest games, new HDTV and PureVideo settings, as well as support for OpenGL 2.0.

When the game application throughput of a single-slot GeForce 7800 GTX GPU was compared to a GeForce 6800 Ultra dual-slot GPU, the New-Generation technology attained a level 2.3x its predecessor, all the while keeping power consumption to 50% of the level reached by the 6800 â?“ which has to be a testimony for Nvidia. As well as impressive stats, the GeForce 78000 GTX GPU is also able to achieve advanced visual effects thanks to the integration of the Microsoft DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0 engine, which includes a 128-bit floating point core that allows for high quality film-like effects including High Dynamic Lighting in real-time. The card also allows for transparency supersampling and multisample antialiasing leaving scene-wide antialiasing to be featured throughout, rather than just along the edges of polygons. The result on games is set to be astonishing with outdoor scenes hightlighted in Nvidiaâ??s statement: â??The result is stunning lifelike images and improved realism.â?

Commenting on the new GPU, Todd Howard, Executive Producer at Bethesda Softworks said, â??High dynamic-range lighting and parallax mapping make a huge difference in the way a game will look, and will ultimately bring a whole new level of realism and polish to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivionâ?¦Nvidia continues to deliver the caliber of GPUs that support these tech features and more, which is exactly what we need to create true next-generation games today.â?

â??New antialiasing modes from Nvidia enable us to deliver even more realism in Battlefield 2,â? said John Vifian, Senior Development Director at Electronic Arts. â??These new modes provide stunning visual quality without sacrificing performance, and that is a real testament to the new GeForce 7 architecture.â?

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping of points made by Nvidia described how the GPU support SLI technology which means that two card can be fitted together to work in tandem allowing for resolutions to be pushed up to 2560×1600 with the addition of 4x antialiasing.

Quickly moving to reassure consumers that the preparation of stock levels had been well thought out, Jeff Fisher, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Nvidia said, â??We've never had such widespread volume availability of a GPU on launch dayâ?¦Frankly, this breakthrough in availability is as significant as the breakthrough the GeForce 7800 GTX GPU makes in performance.â?

There is some question as to whether the GeForce 7800 GTX shares some of the qualities of the Nvidia built GPU for the forthcoming PlayStation 3 console however no mention of that was made by the company in their statements. We wait with baited breath and weâ??ll bring you the latest news shortly...