Nvidia claims G92 will be a 1 Teraflop beast

NVIDIA SAYS its G92 high-end graphics card will deliver almost a teraflop of computing performance.

In an analyst webcast, Nvidian Michael Hara says that the chip will be ready for Christmas, a release cycle the company adopted with G80, where high-end products come out for Chrimbo and the mid-range and low-end products hit in the spring.

This suggests a couple of things. One, that the delays we saw to the release of Nvidia hardware through 2006 and 2007 have now been factored into the schedule, to a point where we're going to see yearly updates of the high-end part every Q4. This is pretty nifty. Second, Nvidia doesn't see the benefit in releasing all three ranges of cards together, preferring to let the 'halo' effect of the high-end card provide a few months of advanced marketing for the mid-range parts.

Second, it puts DAAMIT between a rock and a hard place. AMD is readying Barcelona, and Intel is preparing its own native quad-core chip in Nehalem to hit at the same time. ATI will be prepping the R600 refresh for the end of the year and Nvidia will be hitting with the GeForce 9800. Tough stuff.

The actual power of G92 might surprise some. The 8800 can rustle up about 330Gflops, which means the green team is suggesting that the 9800 could be three times more powerful. If that's true, the question remains - why bother? What games are going to take advantage of that? If the answer is Crysis at 2560x1600, Nvidia better hope that the game doesn't slip much further than it already has. µ