Rumour control – GeForce 9800 could be out for Christmas

Posted at: 11:16am 15th August 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

But will it be able to play DirectX 10 games at a decent frame rate?

After seeing its GeForce 8-series cards well and truly pummelled with a tyre iron in this year’s DirectX 10 games, Nvidia could provide PC gamers with a Christmas treat in the form of the GeForce 9800.

According to tech-scandal site The Inquirer, the dominant 3D graphics company has already ‘taped out’ (meaning that reels of the chips have been produced and shipped to board makers) G92 chips, and the site claims that these chips will be branded as GeForce 9800s. Based on Nvidia’s past record of taking 100 days to go from ‘taping out’ to full production, you could estimate that the GeForce 9800 will be available by November this year.

No concrete specs about the chips have been revealed yet, but The Inquirer’s source said that ‘Nvidia is paying quite a lot of attention to thermals and performance of the chip in complex shaders.’ Of course, this could all be a load of SLI Vista drivers, but it would make a lot of sense to launch a top-performing DirectX 10 part in time for Christmas, especially with Crysis and BioShock being released.

Via The Inquirer