"The day has finally arrived, the first DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0 graphics hardware is here and NVIDIA is the first out of the gate. And this happens to be another hard-launch as we have come to expect from NVIDIA and its partners! Not only is NVIDIA introducing new hardware but it is a totally new architecture that was built with completely new ideas for supporting the next DirectX version. This type of event does not happen often. Microsoft’s DirectX releases have always been a big turning point in the graphics industry and the impact on the industry has grown with each release. The last major Microsoft DirectX upgrade was in December of 2002 when DirectX 9.0 was released for Windows. We’ve been utilizing DirectX 9 as the 3D API for Windows for four years. DirectX 9.0c was released in the interim with Shader Model 3.0 that supported the ability to run longer shaders, but it more allowed faster “wet and bumpy-looking” shaders than anything else."Other than the ridiculously good gaming experience that one can get with the new 8 series cards from nVidia, mainly stemming from native support for DirectX10, there are two things that nVidia has been talking about - support for
PureVideoHD and
ExtremeHD. Boy woud I love to get my hands on this card.