NVIDIA G80 Takes Unified Shader Approach

VR-Zone - The future is actually pretty near where NVIDIA G80 design is based on unified shader architecture slated to appear in 2006. ATI has already taken the unified approach for their R500 Xenon within the XBox 360 and has 48 unified pipelines. As we know, in an unified shader architecture, there are no dedicated vertex and pixel shader engines but unified shader engine capable of executing both types of instructions.

G70 already supports Longhorn WGF 1.0 API so most likely G80 will support WGF 2.0 with improved virtualization techniques and new pipeline stages. G80 design is completed and waiting for ATI R580 when the time comes.