Nvidia G80 meets DX 10 spec with 'dis-unified' shader

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, July 03, 2006, 12:00 PM EDT

Fuad from The Inquirer is reporting that NVIDIA's upcoming G80 GPU will be DX10 compliant, but that it won't feature a unified shader architecture. Rumor has is ATI's R600 GPU will be a unified architecture, however, leveraging technology introduced from the chip used in the XBox360. Details about either GPU at this point in time should be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless, it's always fun to speculate and get a hint at what today's graphic's giants are working on.

"AS we understand it, if a Nvidia DX10 chip ends up with 32 pixel-Shaders, the same chip will have 16 Shaders that will be able to process geometry instancing or the vertex information. ATI's R600 and its unified Shaders work a bit differently. Let's assume that ATI hardware has 64 unified Shaders. This means that ATI can process 64 pixel lines only per clock. That may be in the proportions: 50 pixel, 14 vertex and geometry lines per clock, or 40 vertex, 10 pixel and 14 geometry information per clock. Any ratio that adds up to 64 will do. I hope you get this maths."

Tags: Nvidia, unified, spec, G80, DX, IE, id

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com