14 DAY TRIAL // There has been some serious writing on NVIDIA's next generation of desktop graphics cards, especially since these new cards are expected to boast the company's next-generation microarchitecture, a new manufacturing process and a couple of new features. The new cards are allegedly part of the company's GT300 line, although the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker hasn't been confirming any of the rumors that surfaced on the Internet. However, it now appears that we have a more or less official reference to the said cards, which have been tipped off by a recently released WHQL driver.
Earlier this month, NVIDIA released the GeForce 186.91 series of drivers, designed to deliver support to Windows Vista and Windows 7 users. In the drivers' .inf files, there were details about a couple of GeForce products that hadn't been officially introduced, all of which are part of the much-rumored GT300 series. The list includes the following drivers:
- NVIDIA_DEV.0A29.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M;"
- NVIDIA_DEV.0A2B.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M;"
- NVIDIA_DEV.0A66.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 310;"
- NVIDIA_DEV.0A6E.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 305M;" - NVIDIA_DEV.0A75.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce 310M;"
- NVIDIA_DEV.0CAF.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M;"
- NVIDIA_DEV.0CB0.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTS 350M;"
- NVIDIA_DEV.0CB1.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTS 360M."
Although this isn't enough to confirm a possible release, it's clear that the graphics chip maker is planning to update its line with new cards. What's interesting is that most of the aforementioned products are part of the company's line of mobile GPUs, a fact that is confirmed by the “M” letter at the end of the model name. Unfortunately, we have no specific details on the technical specifications of the new GeForce GPUs, nor do we have a specific release date for the new line.
In other news, NVIDIA is apparently working on the release of a new GeForce GT240, which was tipped off a while back and then said to have been canceled.