AMD to ship DirectX 11 GPUs this year

If you’re planning to put down some cash for a new GPU, you might want to wait. At COMPUTEX, AMD announced that it plans to deliver DirectX 11 GPUs to support Windows 7 later this year, ahead of the competition.
DirectX 11 brings with it three major improvements to the DirectX API:
Tessellation - Allows higher definition 3D models to be created.
Compute Shader - Parallel processing capability
Improved multithreading - Better support for multi-core CPUs
Rick Bergman, senior vice president of AMD’s products group called DirectX 11 “the biggest inflection point in graphics in 10 years.”
The new GPUs will be based on 40nm fabrication technology and produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).
What all this means is that it’s now a bad time to spend much money on a GPU, certainly a high-end one. While DirectX11 is backward compatible, I expect that there will be a performance overhead similar to that you see with DirectX10.1 running on DirectX10 hardware.
Check out these cool DirectX 11 demos caught over at COMPUTEX (via HEXUS):

NVIDIA launches the ‘best performing GPU on the planet’

Accordingly, NVIDIA announced the release of their latest line of graphics cards this morning. The GTX 260 and GTX 280 mark the debut of the upcoming 200 series GPUs. The GTX 280 counts 240 processing cores and 1GB of RAM under its hood, while the 260 claims 192 cores and 896MB of memory. Either way, we’re talking serious graphic and physics horsepower.

Where there’s eyeball-popping graphics, there’s always an eyeball-popping price tag, and these two chips don’t disappoint: the 280 runs for $650 and the 260 at $399. Both require two PCI-E power connections to run and a huge power supply (perhaps 1,000W?) if you’re even thinking about daisy-chaining them a la Scalable Link Interface, or SLI.

Good news, though: this series actually draws less idle power than the company’s last generation of ultra high-performance cards.

What do you think, readers? ‘Best performing GPU on the planet,’ or a lotta horse for too much cash?