nVidia's new G80 GPU that has yet to be released touts a lot of new features, among them 48 pixel shader processors and, most important to gamers, native DirectX 10 (Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0) support. nVidia isn't, however, following Microsofts unified shader language for the development of their card.
"We will do a unified architecture in hardware when it makes sense. When it's possible to make the hardware work faster unified, then of course we will. It will be easier to build in the future, but for the meantime, there's plenty of mileage left in this architecture," David Kirk, who is Nvidia's chief architect, said in an interview with Bit-tech.net web-site.
This could potentially give ATI a leg up when it comes to future titles, at least currently, because they already have working hardware in the market, in the guise of the 360. G80 isn't released yet, so things could change, but it's likely that a future revision of the same GPU will be the first to including these features. Read the full article for more details.