Nvidia plans new graphics card 'within a month'

ATI may have taken poll position in the battle with Nvidia to produce the fastest graphics card, but the latter says it will have a response on the market in about a month, as part of its extreme high definition gaming push.

At CES in Las Vegas at the beginning of January, Nvidia teamed up with Dell to produce a quad SLI Geforce 7800 GTX 512MB PC.

It used four of its top of the range graphics cards in an SLI configuration, which was coupled with the new Dell 3007WFP 30in flat panel monitor, giving image quality at a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600.

A spokesman said: ‘If people don’t want ultimate quality and performance, then they won’t buy this. But you can see that people do. Four cards in SLI isn’t going to be cheap, but we think the market’s there.’

Quad SLI though, isn’t Nvidia’s response to the ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, but merely shows what it can do with its cards, the company said.

Nvidia classes extreme high definition gaming resolutions as being 1,680 x 1,050 and above, so is aimed people with monitors of at least 20in.

This won’t be for anyone on a tight budget, because the monitor and cards alone are going to cost several thousand pounds.

Nvidia would not reveal its next move in its attempts to supersede rival ATI, which leaves us to speculate.

We can’t see it being eight card SLI, because few people have cases big enough, so our best bet is that Nvidia plans to release a Geforce 7800 with 1GB of memory on board, giving yet another speed boost and potentially seeing it leapfrog ATI’s new Radeon boards.