_JP_
21-03-2005, 18:43
To launch in June
PRIOR TO ITS LAUNCH, expected in June, we have a few additional details about ATI's flagship R520 chip.
It turns out that R520 won't just have Shader Model 3.0 it will eventually have support for upcoming Longhorn WGF 1.0 specification. WGF does not stand for Which Graphic Freak, it's an abbreviation of Windows Graphic Foundation. This is what Microsoft has decided to call Direct3D in the future.
WGF 1.0 is actually Direct3D 9.0+ or just beyond the DirectX 9.0c specification. It's also called DX 9.L where L possibly stands for Longhorn.
We are not sure which kind of Shader support you need to be WGF 1.0 compliant, but we are quite sure that we are talking about Shader Model 3.0, as it's time for ATI to go down that road.
We also know that this chip is built on a 90 nanometre process and that even the R530 and RV515 will be based on the same marchitecture.
R520 is expected to perform twice as fast as the X800 generation, will have digital HDTV support, and will come in 256MB and 512MB variants.
I guess that WGF 1.0 support comes for all the developers who want to play with it prior to the launch of Longhorn, but be aware there is also a WGF 2.0 spec that is also known as DirectX 10 or DirectX Next, so that is going to be the real stuff.
Hardware supporting this feature comes in a year's time, in 2006, sometime before the Microsoft Longhorn launch. It might be called R620 but it's still too early to talk about that.
Source:The INQUIRER (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21982)
PRIOR TO ITS LAUNCH, expected in June, we have a few additional details about ATI's flagship R520 chip.
It turns out that R520 won't just have Shader Model 3.0 it will eventually have support for upcoming Longhorn WGF 1.0 specification. WGF does not stand for Which Graphic Freak, it's an abbreviation of Windows Graphic Foundation. This is what Microsoft has decided to call Direct3D in the future.
WGF 1.0 is actually Direct3D 9.0+ or just beyond the DirectX 9.0c specification. It's also called DX 9.L where L possibly stands for Longhorn.
We are not sure which kind of Shader support you need to be WGF 1.0 compliant, but we are quite sure that we are talking about Shader Model 3.0, as it's time for ATI to go down that road.
We also know that this chip is built on a 90 nanometre process and that even the R530 and RV515 will be based on the same marchitecture.
R520 is expected to perform twice as fast as the X800 generation, will have digital HDTV support, and will come in 256MB and 512MB variants.
I guess that WGF 1.0 support comes for all the developers who want to play with it prior to the launch of Longhorn, but be aware there is also a WGF 2.0 spec that is also known as DirectX 10 or DirectX Next, so that is going to be the real stuff.
Hardware supporting this feature comes in a year's time, in 2006, sometime before the Microsoft Longhorn launch. It might be called R620 but it's still too early to talk about that.
Source:The INQUIRER (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21982)