Nvidia will bring to the market two new graphics boards based on their next-generation 'G80' GPU by the middle of November. To be launched are the GeForce 8800 GTX (which will contain a G80 running at 575MHz and connected over a 384-bit bus to 768MB of GDDR 3 clocked to 900MHz) and the GeForce 8800 GTS (which has 96 shaders, clocked to 1200MHz, it's said. The rest of the core runs at 500MHz, the memory at 900MHz.)

Both cards will fully support DX10, as well as SM4 and HDCP crypto-ROM, it has been revealed. Dual-slot cooling set-ups will be featured. The boards use dual-slot designs, and have minimum power requirements of 450W for the GTX and 400W for the GTS in single-card configurations.

The G80 is touted as Nvidia's first GPU with a unified shader architecture. Depending on the requirements of the application being used, each processing unit can handle either pixel colour or geometry data. Each shader is clocked independently.

Nvidia is expected to announce the world's first DirectX 10-compliant graphics chip, the GeForce 8800 (codenamed G80), in the middle of November, graphics card makers revealed. However, despite the advantage of early launch, demand for the new graphics processing unit (GPU) will depend on penetration rate of the new Windows Vista OS and availability of new PC games supporting DirectX 10, the makers indicated.