RV635 Displayport pictorialed
Digital dancing
THE FIRST PICS of a Displayport-enabled graphics card have hit the web this morning, courtesy of the folks at Hot Hardware.
The snaps, which you can spy right here, show an ATI RV635XT board with three digital outputs on the back - DVI, HDMI and the actual Displayport.
The new standard is basically HDMI but without the licensing fees, which will allow computer companies to save a few pennies on every machine and display they sell. It also adds daisy-chaining capability, allowing multiple monitors to be connected to a single graphics card socket.
Expect actual retail boards to sport the socket at some point in Q1 next year - but the roll-out will depend on monitor manufacturers and will almost certainly come first from one of the big names signed up to the standard, most probably Dell. µ
Comments
So what about NVidia 8600 series refresh?
The RV635XT is the 55nm refresh/update of the 65nm HD2600XT to be named HD3600XT. It will feature directX 10.1Meanwhile, no news about what is happening to the rumored G96 NVidia chip, a refresh of the 8600 series, currently on the 80nm process. I saw it was coming in March, then maybe June. NVidia seems to have fallen behind in the midrange battle.
Correction...
If you read the article you'll see that the graphics card actually has 2 x DisplayPort outputs and 1 x DVI. The DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI inputs are for the TFT they're testing it withAMD has pretty much ended the midrange battle.
Once the 3870X2 is out, and the 3870 is widely available, 256MB 3850 cards should run about $150. They could really put the squeeze on by killing the 512MB 3870 as a single gpu card, push the current 3850 to $125, and have a 512MB version for $175, with a 1GB 3870 for $250. That would effectively kill every nVidia card south of the 512MB 8800GT, with dual GPU cards competing reasonably well with the new GTS and old GTX on the high end.