Prior to its launch, expected in June, we have a few additional details about ATI's flagship R520 chip.
It turns out that R520 won't just have Shader Model 3.0 it will eventually have support for upcoming Longhorn WGF 1.0 specification. WGF does not stand for Which Graphic Freak, it's an abbreviation of Windows Graphic Foundation. This is what Microsoft has decided to call Direct3D in the future.
WGF 1.0 is actually Direct3D 9.0+ or just beyond the DirectX 9.0c specification. It's also called DX 9.L where L possibly stands for Longhorn.
We are not sure which kind of Shader support you need to be WGF 1.0 compliant, but we are quite sure that we are talking about Shader Model 3.0, as it's time for ATI to go down that road.
News source:
ieXbeta
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