Today we have some rare news (/sarcasm) regarding the upcoming RV770 and GT200 video cards from AMD and NVIDIA, respectively. Apparently AMD has begun sampling the GDDR3 version of RV770, which has been labeled the RV770PRO. In addition, the company plans to start sampling the RV770XT with 512-bit capable GDDR5 memory in the coming weeks. The RV770 GPU is manufactured on the 55nm node, so it is reasonable to suspect that heat and power consumption will be down from the previous models. Rumors place the performance of the RV770 somewhere around 1.5 to 2x that of the RV670, which sounds pretty good. If current pricing schemes carry over to the next generation, we would not expect either of these cards to be too expensive. RV770 is supposed to launch at the end of June, sometime after (or secretly during) Computex.

On the NVIDIA front, the heavily-talked-about GT200 or D10U graphics chip has started to sample and the card will launch at $499. There is no word yet on the official name of the new card, but many people speculate that it will be the 9900GTX or 9900GT. It will be interesting to see if this card cannibalizes the card NVIDIA currently has at this price point, the 9800GX2. If indeed it does, then the fact that a single chip GT200 outpaces its dual-chip counterpart by itself is a scary thought.

Lastly, in order to meet demand it looks like NVIDIA will be using both 65nm and 55nm GT200 parts. This is likely the result of TSMC not being able to produce a high enough volume of 55nm chips in time. Since 55nm is relatively young, there is still a somewhat smaller capacity. Differences in performance, heat production and power consumption should be abound with the two different versions, so hopefully NVIDIA does not use both version in the same SKU, as that would cause a fair amount of owners to go apeshit.

Source: Fudzilla

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