14 DAY TRIAL // As most of you might know by now, ATI, AMD's graphics subsidiary, will release a new video card that is said to position AMD as the leading graphics card manufacturer. And this is exactly why NVIDIA's current GeForce lineup has recently underwent a series of price cuts, which, looking at things on their brighter side, have only come to favor the end user. However, AMD's reign might not be that long-lived as some believe, because the Santa Clara-based graphics manufacturer is also expected to release a new card very soon.
"Soon" might actually be sometime in August, right after AMD will supposedly unleash the power of its dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2. To be more precise, NVIDIA?s card might drop during the NVISION 08 event, held in San Jose, California between August 25 and 27. This will to be the place where, according to manufacturer, visual computing professionals, world-class gamers, innovative artists and designers, and cutting-edge researchers are going to gather to share their ideas, experience, and passions.
But the NVISION 08 will be more than just that, as it will also be the place where NVIDIA will presumably release the first high-performance GTX 200 55nm-based graphics card, which will probably get the GTX 290 brand name. We might soon have on our hands a card that provides higher clocks for the GPU, Shader and memory but, for the time being, few details have been made available.
The card, or maybe even cards, as there might be more than just one, will probably be a 55nm version of the current GTX 280 or GTX 260 GPUs. What with NVIDIA having already tested its 55nm manufacturing process with the GeForce 9800 GTX+, the new card might just become the next big thing on the graphics market.
But even so, AMD's dual-GPU Radeon still stands good enough chances to top NVIDIA's upcoming card. Just remember that one of the new Radeon graphics is going to sport as much as 2GB of GDDR5 memory, which should help it score quite impressive benchmark results.