Its been a while now and both Nvidia and ATI have stick with their graphic cards, only doing small refreshes or name changes with Nvidia.
Though in these economic conditions its no wonder they have not released new graphic cards and they are hoping to sit out the first half of 2009 before they risk it into the market.
The latest graphic card from ATI is the 4890 and 275GTX from Nvidia, both cards are pretty cheap considering we've seen cards go up to amazing $650 especially from Nvidia, so this is a good sign.
But what will it come next, what strategy will ATI have and how will Nvidia respond since they've been the follower in this latest generation of graphic cards?
From what its known the new generation would be based on a 40nm manufacuring process, ATI is going to make 2 chips, 1 will be for the mainstream market, while the other chip for the performance segment.
Nvidia on the other hand is probably going to go for a 1 chip design for all cards as always, in which it will bring the big guns first and then slowly start bringing out slower variants.
One thing is certain though, Nvidia will not go out developing an expensive chip and wait for manufacuring improvement to bring slower variants, but it will be a mix of power and cheap to make.
The next graphic cards should be an evolution of the current graphic cards and likely we are going to see more streams/processors/shaders, higher clocks and support for DX11.
Nvidia is likely to follow ATI with GDDR5 technology since its cheaper than going for a 512bit bus.
The biggest improvement that we are probably going to see is in the coolors department, neither Nvidia, nor ATI have particularry good reference coolers and they are quite inneffective, loud and consume quite a bit of electricity.
So I'm going to guess that we are going to see some different coolers from both companies, since ATI cards with reference coolers run very hot, as much as 90 degrees and Nvidia cards are pretty close running at 70 degrees on load.
The final high end cards would be close to these:
ATI 5870:
960shaders
850MHz core clock
3500Mhz memory clock
1GB GDDR5 512bit
Nvidia GTX390:
384shaders
750Mhz core clock
3500MHz memory clock
1700MHz shaders clock
1GB GDDR5 512bit
Lower models would probably have smaller bus, i would guess 256bit or 384bit, less shaders and lower clocks.