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nVidia is certainly planning on make lots of hay this Christmas, rolling out revisions to its mid-range GeForce 8 series and raking in the cash on the technology it has spent the last few years developing. But one thing is noticeably absent from the firm’s Christmas lineup - any signs of GeForce 9. Earlier on this year, Nvidia’s senior management were telling press in behind-the-scenes briefings that the plan was to stick to the GeForce 7 and 8 launch schedule - a new high-end part for Christmas, and mainstream spin-outs in Q1 and 2 the following year.
This hasn’t happened for GeForce 9. Why? Well, because it hasn’t had to. The various re-spins of GeForce 8 are plenty powerful enough to keep Nvidia at cruising speed through the holiday season, without pulling out the big guns - after all, the competition this year has been barely worth looking at so the green team has had the market to itself. Well, now Digitimes reckons that GeForce 9 is on track for a February 2008 release date. It seems feasible, but there is nobody at Nvidia who will confirm this either way, not least because the company is notoriously wishy-washy when it comes to rumours. [The Inquirer]

View: Story at Digitimes

Due to continued demand, particularly from Internet cafe and emerging markets, for AGP-based products, Nvidia is scheduled  to launch an updated bridge chip which supports the company’s newer GPUs in October, according to sources at graphics card makers. Nvidia’s BR02 chip was designed to convert the company’s PCI Express-based GeForce 7600 (G73) GPU to support AGP, however, this chip is not compatible with GeForce 8 series GPUs. A new version, A05, will work with current GeForce 8600 (G86) and 8400 (G84) GPUs and well as the upcoming G92 and G98, noted the sources.
View: The full story @ DigiTimes

Microsoft has announced the details of its new DirectX version; to ensure full support one need not only to install Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista but may also need to replace a graphics card. Contemporary graphics accelerators from Nvidia GeForce 8800 and AMD/ATI Radeon 2900 may not support all the new features added to Direct3D 10.1. The features of DirectX 10.1 include incremental improvements to 3D rendering quality. As for the innovations, among them are 32-bit floating-point operations (instead of 16-bit ones, used today by default) and obligatory support of 4x FSAA.
Microsoft’s Sam Glassenberg did however note that “DirectX 10.1 fully supports DirectX 10 hardware. No hardware support is being removed. It’s strictly a superset. It’s basically an update to DirectX 10 that extends the hardware functionality slightly.” Glassenberg says DirectX 10.1 will be fully compatible with all graphics cards supporting DirectX 10. All the company wants to do now is to increase the API life cycle. Sam confirmed that existing graphics cards may still not be able to use all the new features of DirectX 10.1 but also stressed that applications designed specifically for DirectX 10.1 are very unlikely to appear, because overall, the updates aren’t that critical. [Xbit Laboratories]