Via: Kotaku

"PC gamers may want to have some extra cash on-hand in a few month's time, because both AMD and Nvidia are expected to release the "next generation" of graphics chips later this year.

A report over on VentureBeat says that the debut of this "next gen" tech will be so important to both companies that "it's bound to drive the stock prices of the rivals involved either up or down through the rest of the year".

At the moment, AMD are tipped to have their new hardware on the market first, timed for release alongside Microsoft's new Windows 7. Nvidia, meanwhile, are keeping quiet on the release of their new chips, leading some to speculate that they've fallen behind a little with their design.

Both companies will be making extensive use of 40nm chips on their new cards, and both are expected to have support for DirectX 11 across their range within a year or so."

Great, now we can just speculate about the number of different variations released and their price points. At the very least, this ought to help push down the price of current cards. Apart from price, lets hope that Windows 7 adoption is good so we might actually see some games really utilize the new DirectX.

I don't even fully know the specs for Direct X 11, anyone got any good links?

As far as games go, the most important things seem to be tesselation and better use of multi-core CPUs.

Tomorrow the Radeon HD 4850 announcement will be one year old, so...
Anyway AMD will most likely release their new cards before nVIDIA (as much as four or five months earlier), possibly a 1.6B transistors 1280:64:32 card at ~800MHz and a $300 price tag.

It'd probably be a while before I hop into DX11 since I'm still on XP and I'd rather not get Vista so that leaves Windows 7 and it's continuation of having numerous editions to pick through. 

Really, the whole video card buisness is so complex.

I wonder why Nvidia is lagging behind so much with DX11. Most rumors point out a 2010 release while ATI is going to have a July/August 2009 release.

Also the compute shaders and the seamless ability to use Windows 7 and a DX11 class GPU to encode video on the fly as you copy from your camera into the computer which is what I heard as well. DX11 is designed to be more efficient, so the same level of hardware will produce better results.

Nvidia may be going for a large die size for their main GPU and 40nm TSMC has had a few problems. The HD 4770 is still not really in stock on NewEgg for example and thats a small die.

The ATI 5800 series is going to be amazing. I have that gut feeling.

It will be almost as groundbreaking in performance as R300 (the ATI Radeon 9500/9700 cards). At least I dreamt about it would be so.