Rumor: NVIDIA GeForce 400 Cards Coming After March 6th [Sources Say That Fermi-Based GPUs Will Launch After CeBIT]

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We’ve been waiting for NVIDIA’s GeForce 400 series since January November September forever, but now rumors are out that the next-gen DirectX 11 capable graphics card series from NVIDIA will becoming sometime after the CeBIT expo in Germany, which ends, March 6th of this year. The GeForce 400 series, or more accurately, the Fermi GPU that powers them, has been long plagued with delays and reported problems.

Information on the Dx11 Fermi GPU was first unveiled in September 2009, while competitor ATI was first shipping their DirectX 11-capable Radeon HD 5000 series cards. The plot thickens as NVIDIA was contracted to provide graphics for a new supercomputer being built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Rumors have it (ones which were strongly denied by NVIDIA’s PR staff) that NVIDIA couldn’t meet the design requirements for the graphics processors for the Oak Ridge supercomputer. This, allegedly, lead to delays in the consumer Fermi cards as NVIDIA’s engineering intellect was reorganized to fix the Oak Ridge problem.

NVIDIA did release a few “next-gen” cards, dubbed the GeForce 300 series, they were little more than overclocked GeForce 200 series cards. They were built on the old chip architecture (non-Fermi) and were not DirectX 11-capable. At CES, NVIDIA revealed that their new Fermi-based chips will be christened as the “GeForce 400″ series. A few “product roadmaps” were leaked, putting the cards at a late March-early April release but NVIDIA claimed they were fake.

Website Fudzila is now reporting that we can expect the GeForce 400 series cards to start arriving sometime after the CeBIT trade show, in Germany, which officially ends. They’re alleging that the GeForce 400 series is currently in production, although part of the delay is the two weeks of vacation for the Chinese New Year that stalls all tech factories in the Far East.