During Computex the first concrete rumots about NVIDIA and ATI’s coming next generation graphics circuits appeared and they were not amusing. We heard power supply manufacturers talking about graphics cards consuming up to 300W, you can compare this to the 145W (at worst) GeForce 7950GX2 consumes. We’ve just found out that G80 may use up to 700 million transistors and require a cooling based on water to be able to remove all of the heat. It seems more than amazing that ATI’s R600 circuit will actually be able to top this.
R600 will according to The Inquirer be able to consume up to 250W to handle its tasks. Even if it will use a more effective 80nm manufacturing process it will most likely be an incredibly hot graphics card and we can only speciculate about what kind of cooling ATI has in mind for this monster card. While processor manufacturers are doing everything they can to lower the power consumption the graphics circuit manufacturers seem to have lost the minds completely and let the power consumption escalate out of proportion. Soon we will need personal power supplies and cryo chambers to be able to use our 3D graphics cards.
ATI R600 and NVIDIA G80 seems to be graphics card on steroids and the question is if they really are commercially feasible. We are might anxious to see some more concrete and official information about the two.
