AMD will beat Nvidia to DX11 by months

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Nvidia concentrating on reworking their GPUs to include DX10.1

AMD has already announced that it is planning to release Direct X11 (DX11) compatible graphics hardware before the end of 2009. Not only will the new graphics cards be able to take advantage of Microsoft’s new API, but they will also sport a brand new 40nm die shrink, theoretically offering improved power efficiency and lower temperatures, and therefore potentially greater performance.

It was previously stated that there was a good chance that Nvidia would launch its own 40nm DX11 product at around the same time, however, leaked information reveals that Nvidia will not in fact be DX11 ready until next year, and it may even be towards the middle of the year.

While AMD was happily demonstrating DX11 running on its hardware at Computex last week, Nvidia is apparently reworking its current GPU architecture. Various inside sources close to Nvidia have revealed to a variety of publications that Nvidia will not have DX11 hardware ready before mid 2010.

At this stage there are only rumors to go by and one can hardly expect Nvidia to come out and announce that it is behind AMD.

While many view DX10 as a failure that did not manage to optimize high-end computing for the masses, DX11 along with Windows 7 is said to run a far trimmer and more efficient operation.

A source at AMD revealed in a recent press briefing that AMD will beat Nvidia to market with DX11 by months, and that it is even possible that Intel will arrive with a DX11 Larrabee GPU before Nvidia.

Nvidia will however make it to market with 40nm revisions of its current parts in the next few months. The GTS 218 and GTS 216 are the first announced 40nm GPUs from Nvidia, and will be the first GPUs from the company to support DirectX 10.1.

While AMD will beat Nvidia to DX11 by months, it is unlikely that many developers will be motivated to take advantage of the new API’s features until Nvidia gets on board.

DirectX 11 will ship with Windows 7 on October 22 2009. A DirectX 11patch will also be released for Windows Vista in the same month.

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