NVIDIA is proud to announce that they have also outperformed their nineteen millionth Shader Model 3.0-enabled card, which means so many GeForce 6 and 7 series cards have sold out in a total of 1,5 years.
The world’s first SM3.0 graphics card, the GeForce 6800 Ultra, was first introduced to consumers in April 2004. The technology has moved from the slice of the most expensive cards to the market of the cheapest ones in a matter of seconds, and then with the release of the GeForce 7 series, the entire product family will be replaced quite slowly.
NVIDIA's Shader Model 3.0 is greatly enhanced by the fact that ATI is just now beginning to market products with similar capabilities, so far they have had virtually no competition at all. Some say that after a long delay, the R520 may not be available as a real mass product, as by the time I start making hundreds of thousands of cards based on it, the successor R580 could be completed, promising much more performance than they would need. However, this is still strongly the music of the future.
