During Computex AMD has offered the first real DirectX 11 demonstrations, not just emulation, but real genuine DX11 hardware. Even if AMD has been very quiet when it comes to the actual hardware it has presented chips and speculations indicate that the prototype card AMD used at Computex was a mid-range card, perhaps RV840 or similar. The first paparazzi photo of AMD’s DX11 card has surfaced.
The photo is taken through the side panel of a case and not very detailed, but the picture and the source reveal that the card is about 21cm (8 1/4″) long and use a dual-slot cooler. The card uses a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, which may point to it being mid-range, the cooler on the other hand should mean more high-end.
AMD has great expectations for DirectX 11 and during the recent conference call it said it would be very surprised if NVIDIA would be the first to launch the next generation of graphics cards. Instead it believes this will not happen until next year, while AMD is hoping for a much earlier launch.
It revealed that even though the demonstrations done at Computex was with genuine DX11 hardware, fps meters and other had been manipulated not to give any hints of the true performance of the chip, which could explain the seemingly poor rendering performance in some presentations.
