Rumour control: Nvidia to make big September announcement

Posted at: 5:25pm 25th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

After SLI was codenamed Big Bang, speculation is rife about what Big Bang II could offer if it’s announced in September

Back in 2004, Nvidia announced that it was reviving the world of dual-graphics from the ashes of 3dfx, as well as the SLI acronym, albeit with a different meaning. In the build-up, SLI was modestly codenamed Big Bang, and a leaked presentation slide over at Chile Hardware apparently shows that Nvidia has plans to announce its successor, Big Bang II, in September.

The question is: What sort of announcement could deserve the same level of billing as SLI? We’ve already had the new GTX 280 and 260 GPUs, and we’ve already seen plenty of dual-GPU graphics cards too. The blurry slide reveals what could be included in Big Bang II, although it’s very difficult to decipher. Among its bullet points are OpenGL 3.0, as well as quality and performance improvements. We think it also says ‘SLI connectivity features’ too.

However, Nordic Hardware claims that the new announcement will concern ‘updated CUDA support and improved drivers.’ The site also claims that ‘SLI will be updated,’ adding that Big Bang II could offer ‘improved scaling in various SLI configurations.’ Meanwhile, The Inquirer  claims that Big Bang II will allow you to enable SLI on multi-monitor setups, as well as offer ten-bit display support, all of which will come from the 180-series ForceWare drivers.

If the above speculation is true, then it certainly doesn’t sound like it will be as big a bang as the original SLI announcement, but then very few details are known at the moment and all of this just speculation as far as we know. If you had a Big Bang wish list, what would you like to see in Nvidia’s next big announcement? Let us know your thoughts.