News : GPUs & Graphic Cards : NVIDIA G80 Takes Unified Shader Approach
NVIDIA's Chief Architect David Kirk has said in the recent interview that they will do a unified architecture in hardware when it makes sense and when it is possible to make the hardware work faster unified. It will be easier to build in the future, but for the meantime, there's plenty of mileage left in this G70 architecture.
VR-Zone came to know that the future is actually pretty near where NVIDIA G80 design is based on unified shader architecture slated to appear in 2006. ATI has already taken the unified approach for their R500 Xenon within the XBox 360 and has 48 unified pipelines.As we know, in an unified shader architecture, there are no dedicated vertex and pixel shader engines but unified shader engine capable of executing both types of instructions.
G70 already supports Longhorn WGF 1.0 API so most likely G80 will support WGF 2.0 with improved virtualization techniques and new pipeline stages. The likely process technology choice for G80 is 90nm and the architecture is made for high core speed (~1GHz). G80 design is completed and waiting for ATI R580 when the time comes.
