NVIDIA Teases with Photo of GF100 Running DirectX 11

Hot on the heels of ATI’s launch of the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970, an NVIDIA employee posted a fun little image on his Facebook that shows off a GF100 card, also known as the first card to use the company’s Fermi core. That’s not what’s important. What is, is that the card is seen running the Unigine DirectX 11 benchmark, with all its tessellation goodness in tact (you can tell tessellation is active by the spikes on the dragon). This is a good sign that the final silicon is right around the corner.

But… no matter how much NVIDIA tries to prove a point, there’s always a minor issue that causes the skeptics to question the validity of it all, and to be honest, I can’t blame them. The first problem is that this is a picture, not video, so there’s no real proof that it’s running at all. The second issue is that in the image, there’s another motherboard on a riser, with an audio card conspicuously installed, blocking out the view of the graphics card that could be running behind it.

Whether the picture is legit or not is up to you, but despite the things that work against NVIDIA in the photo, I’m going to believe that it is. At this point in time, I just can’t see NVIDIA putting out a “faked” photo after the issue with the mock card at Siggraph. Plus, we are at a point where Fermi cards are right around the corner, with a hopeful launch next month, or at the latest, very early 2010.

Aside from the benchmark being run, we can see that the GF100 card requires just two PCI-E 6-pin power connectors, which is nice to see given this is going to be NVIDIA’s highest-end offering for a while. ATI’s highest-end single-GPU, the Radeon HD 5870, is no different in this regard, but given that Fermi is supposed to be quite the power-hungry beast, seeing that we’re going to be able to fore go an 8-pin power connector is nice.