The current leading manufacturer of high-performance graphics cards, AMD, is expected to transition to Microsoft's next-generation API, DirectX 11, sometime in 2009. In addition, the company is also said to be planning its very first 40nm-based graphics chips, which could also hit the market sometime next year, thus thrusting yet another dagger in NVIDIA's back.

 

Details are rather scarce for the time being, as we are still about 12 to 14 months away from such a product coming out, but it appears that AMD's graphics subsidiary plans to consolidate its position as a leading graphics card market, especially since NVIDIA is still working on a reliable competitor for the dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2. ATI announced that it expected graphics processors with support for DirectX 11 to appear sometime in 2009. On top of all that, ATI has also been discussing its upcoming transition to 40nm process technology and even the rise of GPGPU (General Purpose GPU), which the company plans to provide support for.

 

DirectX 11 is expected to deliver an enhanced support for both GPGPU and multithreading, thus improving the overall graphics performance of future graphics cards. One of the main components of DirectX 11 will be tesselation, which will enable faster and smoother rendering of complex 3D models and, with a tesselation engine built inside the hardware, fewer polygons will be needed. In addition, DirectX 11 will also include Shader Model 5.0, which will also require hardware support.

 

The upcoming RV870, or the Lil' Dragon, ATI's next-generation 40nm-based graphics processors, will also come with support for GPGPU, in the form of OpenCL, which is basically an answer to NVIDIA's CUDA software technology. The upcoming Radeon card will be equipped with faster GDDR5 memory, while certain rumors indicate that there's even the possibility of 2000 Shader processors.

 

NVIDIA is also trying to bring support for DirectX 11, which will work with Windows Vista. Either way, this should prove an interesting competition, as the two main competitors in the graphics card market will attempt to position themselves as best as possible before Intel finally releases its Larrabee.