WE learned that the upcoming red DirectX 10 ATI part also known as R600 might be the fastest card for the DirectX 9 titles as well. The point won't be to try to take the performance crown for the yet to come DirectX 10 titles, ATI rather wants to rule the current Direct X 9 market.
R600 will be designed to run DirectX 9 code just as fast as it is supposed to run Direct X 10 code. Unified Shaders apparently can run code that gives a toss about Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader just as fast. There will be an abstraction layer that will decide whether the information is pixel, vertex or geometry, and it will be served by an adequate hardware pipe. So we don’t think that the DirectX 10 hardware should care that much about the DirectX 10 versus DirectX 10 code.
If you take into account that the R600 will have a very high clock, fast memory and more pixel operation pipes than the current hardware it might be the winning combination. Just don’t take the G80 for granted, as Nvidia has surprised us many times before.
Nvidia is really tight lipped about its G80 cards and very few people actually know whether the chip is taped out of not. It has to be if the September is still the target but it's quite hard to confirm it at this point. Nvidia wants its partners to care about the current 7950 GX2 hardware as this is what the company can deliver - the G80 is still a few months away.
sa: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32713