14 DAY TRIAL // After details on AMD's next generation graphic cards were officially announced, it looks like rumors of NVIDIA's upcoming GPUs have also been leaked. According to DailyTech, the leading manufacturer of graphic cards is planning to establish an embargo on its upcoming graphics core codenamed D10U. This GPU is expected to be released in two flavors, which are currently listed under the names of GeForce GTX 280 (D10U-30) and GeForce GTX 260 (D10U-20).
The GeForce GTX 280 is expected to feature the full power of the D10U graphic processor, while its smaller counterpart, the GTX 260, will have less graphic power. The GTX 280 will have all of its 240 unified stream processes, which are designed into the processor, featured at their full graphic potential. It seems that, with the release of the new D10U GPU, NVIDIA will yet again raise the performance bar by 50 percent, compared to their recently released D9 cards. The strategy is rather strange, as until now NVIDIA released their next generation graphic card with a considerable time gap between them.
The difference between the two graphic cards, which will originate from the same GPU, consists in their number of shaders and memory bus width. It seems that NVIDIA will disable 48 stream processors on its GTX 260 graphic card. The GTX 280 is expected to ship with 1 GB of GDDR3 memory, capable of running on a 512-bit memory bus, while the GTX 260 version will only be featured with a 448-bit bus with support for 896MB.
All the other features found on these graphic cards are pretty much the same as the ones on GeForce 9800GTX with a PCIe 2.0 interface, OpenGL 2.1, SLI and PureVideoHD support. It seems that, unlike AMD, NVIDIA will not feature their upcoming graphic cards with DirectX support above 10.0. The cards are expected to support 3-way SLI graphic configurations.
These next generation graphic cards are NVIDIA's first attempt to incorporate PhysX. Up to this moment, NVIDIA hasn't delivered on their promise to have all CUDA-enabled processors with support for PhysX. However, the new D10U processor is expected to support CUDA, thus will also be PhysX-enabled.