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But not this year, sonny
NVIDIA IS PLANNING to make lots of hay this Christmas, rolling out revisions to its mid-range GeForce 8 series and raking in the cash on the technology it has spent the last few years developing.
But one thing is noticeably absent from the firm's Christmas lineup - any signs of GeForce 9.
Earlier on this year, Nvidia's senior management were telling press in behind-the-scenes briefings that the plan was to stick to the GeForce 7 and 8 launch schedule - a new high-end part for Christmas, and mainstream spin-outs in Q1 and 2 the following year.
This hasn't happened for GeForce 9. Why? Well, because it hasn't had to. The various re-spins of GeForce 8 are plenty powerful enough to keep Nvidia at cruising speed through the holiday season, without pulling out the big guns - after all, the competition this year has been barely worth looking at so the green team has had the market to itself.
Well, now Digitimes reckons that GeForce 9 is on track for a February 2008 release date. It seems feasible, but there is nobody at Nvidia who will confirm this either way, not least because the company is notoriously wishy-washy when it comes to rumours.
As for gamers - there's no doubting that they'd love to see a GeForce 9 this year, if only to get Crysis running at a decent speed. But when there's not much competition, there's no pressure to get parts out of the door - so perhaps ATI better get its act together for all your sakes, lest it's 2009 before we see the next major upgrade to the GeForce series. µ [/b]
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Nvidia to launch GeForce 9 series in February
Nvidia is ready for its next-generation GPU launch. According to sources at graphics card makers, the company plans to launch its GeForce 9 series GPU after the Lunar New Year in February.
The first chip to rollout of in GeForce 9 family will be the D9E, a high-end product that adopts 65nm manufacturing. The new product will also support DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, revealed the sources.
In addition to the D9E, Nvidia will roll out a mid-range GeForce 9 family product named D9P in June 2008. The new GPU will adopt 55nm processing, the sources pointed out. [/b]
PS. 