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Nvidia to formally launch tri-SLI?
November 8th might be the day Nvidia formally launches triple SLI in the UK, according to a rather indiscreet email in my inbox.
This coincides nicely with Nvidia's launch of the Geforce 8800GT graphics card, which is a space-saving, single slot card. It has a smaller cooler because it's based on a 65nm process with an estimated 110W power draw, lower than its high end siblings. SLI isn't very efficient in Vista though, which you can read more about in our Wired2Fire Diablo Extreme review.
The 8800GT's core speed is 600MHz, shaders sit at 1.5GHz – on a par with the Geforce 8800 Ultra – while GDDR3 Ram is clocked at 1.8GHz. With 112 stream processors, more than an 8800GTS's 96 and less than an 8800GTX's 128, it's positioned right between the two and performance looks intriguing; Expect a review soon.
Online retailers are already taking orders for the card (for less than £180) and AMD will respond in the coming weeks with its RV670 GPU, which is a die shrink of the 2900XT from 80nm to 55nm, with a few tweaks. I've been informed by manufacturers that performance isn't as good as the 2900XT because it only has a 256bit memory controller.
AMD says the processor will form its Radeon HD 3800 series. It has DirectX 10.1 support, which will be included in Vista Service Pack 1 in early 2008. DirectX 10.1 fixes a lot of DirectX 10 limitations and its biggest new feature is Cube Map Arrays that can produce mimic many ray trace effects like indirect lighting, soft shadows and refraction.
ATI's and Nvidia's new cards just missed out on our mammoth graphics card grouptest (in the Christmas issue on newsstands today), where we put every other ATI and Nvidia card (14 DirectX 10 cards in total) through DirectX 9 and 10 benchmarks.
Posted by Emil Larsen on November 1, 2007 | Permalink
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