Rumour has it from The Inquirer that NVIDIA's next-gen G80 core could be here sooner than expected.

WE CAN now confirm that mighty Nvidia taped out its first G80 chip.

The first successful silicon turned up from the fab a couple weeks ago now, it seems. This puts the company bang on the schedule for its Septembrish launch.

Nvidia believes it can have A six-to-eight-week lead over ATI with its new chip. ATI plans its new R600 chip for end of this year, probably Novemberish time.

The Inquirer also managed to gather up some spicey info on the specifications G80 is likely to carry, incl. NVIDIAs plans to meet DX 10 specs in time for Vista.

WE HEAR Nvidia has been beavering away fo meet the DirectX 10 specification.

And the firm decided it doesn't need a unified Shader for its upcoming G80 chipset. Instead, it decided that you will be fine with twice as many pixel Shader numbers as geometry and vertex Shaders.

AS we understand it, if a Nvidia DX10 chip ends up with 32 pixel-Shaders, the same chip will have 16 Shaders that will be able to process geometry instancing or the vertex information.