Both leaders of the graphics market segment - Nvidia and ATI - recently announced that they will launch chips which are said to be DX 10 compliant, delivering in the same time Shader Model 4.0 support, informs Megagames.

The soon to emerge battle between Nvidia and ATI will be determined by the means chosen for their chips in order to process pixel Shaders, geometry instancing and vertex information.

"ATIs design is expected to adopt the unified Shader model which allows for flexibility by utilizing 64 unified Shaders. This way the chip has 64 pixel lines available per clock. It can use those in any ratio it needs to mean that, for example, 30 can be pixel, 20 vertex and 14 geometry lines per clock cycle. nVidia's design however, challenges the unified Shader model and will use a more rigid design of 32 pixel Shaders and 16 vertex and geometry lines per clock cycle," writes Megagames.

Consequently, Nvidia's representatives said that the company's latest G80 chip is already mass produced and it will probably be available on the retail market in September. On the other hand, ATIs R600 chip will be shipped in November.

But the battle between ATI and Nvidia was overshadowed today by an undisclosed source, a game developer, who implied that both companies' products are not able to support his game's physics. Moreover, the only graphics card that was able even to enhance it was Ageia's.

"If you want to use 3D particle water spray or wave ripples, you need Physics to do it properly," said the livid source.