GeForce G310 Fermi - Nvidia news! 2010

While ATI is busy launching their new DX11 cards, nVIDIA is still betting on their G216-300 series, new 40nm core cards but with DX10.1 support. Officially, the new 40nm GPUs from nVIDIA will be announced in a few weeks, but in the meantime, Gigabyte has already released the specifications of their own GT 220 online.

The card presented by Gigabyte has a 720Mhz core and 1GB DDR3 RAM, with the frequency of 1600Mhz and 128-bit interface. Also present are 48 Stream Processors with the shader featuring a 1568Mhz clock. These frequences are used on the OC version and in the future, overclocked versions will be launched.

The card also has DVI, D-Sub and HDMI outputs, and the cooling system is different from the reference model. In the next few weeks nVIDIA should make the launching official, and the cards will be available for the manufacturers first, then for the market.

The manufacturing of the GT300 chipsets from nVIDIA, the first core made with the 40nm process and compatible with DirectX 11 is good, and the rumors about problems in the manufacturing are wrong.

“Our (Nvidia’s) 40nm yields are fine. The rumors you are hearing are baseless”, said a senior manager from nVIDIA for the site Fudzilla. The rumors of problems in the manufacturing of the GT300 chip started to be heard in the past few weeks. nVIDIA’s statement refer to the the 40nm process in general, but since the rumors talked about the GT300, it’s easy to assume nVIDIA refers also to this product.

The GT300 is expected to launch this trimester, at the end of November or beginning of December.

Earlier this month, some rumors from China indicated the arrival of a smartbook based on the Tegra platform and featuring the new Google Chrome OS. The rumor mentioned names as Acer and Lenovo and indicated the end of September as the launch date of those smartbooks.

Three weeks later, nVIDIA mobile’s General Manager, Mike Rayfield, has confirmed the collaboration between the two companies and the mysterious Chrome OS is one of the solutions for the Tegra platform. Basically, besides Windows Mobile, Windows CE and Android, Chrome OS will also be among the Operating Systems that will be used on the next smartbooks. The choice, according to Rayfield, will be entirely up to the manufacturers. He didn’t specify precise dates, but it should be launched by the end of this year.

While ATI’s strategy is to emphasize the launch of the first graphic cards with DX11 support, nVIDIA declares that there’s no need to worry about their own “delay” in launching the next-generation GPUs.

According to nVIDIA, the DirectX 11-ready factor won’t be the main selling point of the new GPUs, but the important thing will be the overall performance on the new cards, with things like the CUDA software that will allow the new GPUs to be used as a co-processor, helping the CPU in many situations.

nVIDIA hasn’t mentioned, however, that the main factor on the new graphic cards will be the availability of titles that are capable of using the new APIs that will be featured on Windows 7, highlighting other features and the versatility of their cards.

Truth is, until games are compatible with the new DX11 APIs, which will probably not happen until the second half of next year, the new cards won’t be more useful than the current DX10 ones, also because the newest titles to be launched still this year will be based on the DirectX 10.1 in any case.

After our brief vacation, we’re back to work and today we’re talking about the new Apple OS, Snow Leopard and the support to OpenCL. Snow Leopard will be the first to integrate the OpenCL, a cross-platform programming interface based on the Open Source standards that allow the developers to reach the maximum graphic performance from the GPU and put it to work with basically any application.

OpenCL uses the nVIDIA CUDA architecture and allows the system to use the CPU and GPU as co-processors. Thanks to the general integration from the CUDA architecture, nVIDIA was able to offer Apple a vast selection of 10 card models that are fully supported by Snow Leopard. The cards are: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 9600M GT, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce GT 120, GeForce GT 130, GeForce GTX 285, GeForce 8800 GT, GeForce 8800 GS, NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 and Quadro FX 5600.

Besides cooperating with Apple to integrate the support to OpenCL on Snow Leopard, nVIDIA has also released new OpenCL drivers for Linux and Windows.