AMD to launch DirectX 11 cards in September

According to Brightsideofnews, we are to expect AMD's long-anticipated DirectX 11 generation in under seven weeks. This means the launch will take place somewhere in September. The introduction of these new Radeon cards for the North-American market will take place in California, at a special location in San Francisco. The exact location has not yet been mentioned.

The new generation of DirectX 11 graphics cards will initially consist of five models, each intended for a different market segment. This way, AMD will be able to integrate DirectX 11 technology faster, making it possible to get a headstart on competitor nVidia. The cheapest DirectX 11 card is to cost about $50 USD, which means the technology will be affordable for everyone. AMD's new RV8x0 generation of videochips is part of the Evergreen family and as a result, the models have derived their codenames from the names of trees and plants.

The high-end Cypress will be a dual-GPU solution, but the exact details and specifications are still unknown. A new feature in this generation of GPUs will be the 'dual shader engine'  though a lot of speculation remains regarding this technology. It's possible that the word defines a new method of sharing graphics memory between the physical GPUs, which would allow multi-GPU setups to be more efficient. It is also possible that the word is to mean something completely different.

From entry-level to high-end, the initial AMD DirectX 11 series looks like this:

• Hemlock (entry-level)
• Cedar (mainstream)
• Redwood (mainstream)
• Juniper (performance)
• Cypress (enthusiast)

AMD will have the entire series of DirectX 11 cards ready at the launch, but some cards will not yet be available in large numbers. It's remarkable that AMD has decided to introduce an entire line-up right away, where the old tradition used to be to herald new generations with a high-end model, after which cheaper versions were added. According to Brightsideofnews, AMD's new 'Evergreen' cards are to become the strongest line-up seen in years.

AMD already showed a wafer with 40nm DirectX 11 GPU's during the Computex

Tags: computex radeon tegra directx directx11

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