NVIDIA’s First Two Fermi Cards To Be Named GeForce GTX 480, 470 [NVIDIA Skipping Desktop 300-series Cards, Still No Release Date]

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Graphics manufacturer NVIDIA released via their Twitter feed that the desktop models of their upcoming Fermi DirectX-11 capable graphics card will be named the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480. This comes as a slight surprise as the GTX 300-series was expected to be next, and NVIDIA has already released some mobile GTX 300-series cards.

The single desktop card and small lineup of mobile graphics cards that NVIDIA have released under the GTX 300-series banner have simply been rebranded GTX 200-series cards with the same chip and hardware. NVIDIA, who once was the market and mindshare leader in the home enthusiast graphics space, is quickly falling behind competitor ATI.

ATI has had their DirectX 11 cards ready for sometime, and recently announced that they’ve shipped their 2,000,000th DirectX 11-capable card, all before NVIDIA’s has even hit the market.

Stories have been reported on the internet (which NVIDIA strongly denies) that their Fermi/GF100 /GTX 400 cards have been delayed because of issues with NVIDIA producing graphics for a supercomputer being built at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

NVIDIA was producing Fermi chips for a new supercomputer being built at Oak Ridge. Reports on the internet (which again, NVIDIA PR strongly denies, so take it with a gran of salt) say that the Fermi chips weren’t meeting the power and temperature specifications required by the supercomputer, and that NVIDIA was falling out of favor with Oak Ridge, hence the delay in consumer chips.

At any rate, we seem to be getting closer to the launch of NVIDIA’s DirectX-11 cards. They’ve released the names of the new cards, but still no word on a release date. Despite originally being slated for a release date of last October, rumor now puts the new cards at coming out this March-April.