Nvidia's Next Graphic Chips Coming Soon

Upgrade to the popular GeForce 6800 line will be available next month.

Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service

The latest upgrade to Nvidia's popular GeForce 6800 line of GPUs (graphics processing units) for PCs should be out by July, according to Taiwanese motherboard and graphics card makers at the Computex exhibition in Tapei.

The new Nvidia GPUs will be the PC version of the technology that's going into PlayStation 3 game consoles, which drew rave reviews at the recent E3 gamers conference in Los Angeles.

The mid-summer launch of the much anticipated chips could also play spoiler to dual graphics card technology from the company's main rival, ATI Technologies, which will be on the market at about the same time.

Advance Notice

Motherboard companies usually know far in advance the launch time of most PC components and technology because they have to prepare supporting parts well in advance. A motherboard is the main circuit board inside a PC that holds and connects all of its chips, drives, and other parts.

Nvidia officials at the show declined to comment on the launch date of their next generation chip, code-named G70, allowing only that the GPUs would be out "much sooner" than the PlayStation 3.

The PlayStation 3's RSX graphics chips are still under development, says Keita Iida, director of marketing for Japan and Korea at Nvidia. The game console itself is expected on the market in the spring of 2006.

For more coverage of Asia's largest technology show, see PC World's Computex news page.