Rumor: NVIDIA To Release GTX 460 Card [The Next GeForce 400 Series GPU Allegedly Detailed By Website, To Compete With Radeon HD 5850 In Price & Performance]

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Sites on the web are now reporting that the next Fermi-based card in NVIDIA’s next-gen GeForce 400 series will be a new mid-range card dubbed the GTX 460. It will allegedly compete with ATI’s Radeon HD 5850 in terms of price and performance.

NVIDIA doesn’t comment on unannounced products, so this is all unconfirmed. The GTX 460 will allegedly be carrying 1GB of VRAM on a 256-bit memory bus. Nothing has been announced regarding the clockspeed or number of shader cores. The GTS 450 was a rumored card that we reported on some time ago – and that card was supposed to have 192 shaders.

If you assume that the GTX 460 will still be based on the Fermi chip (as opposed to a GF104 or another one of these new chips we’ve seen rumored) then you can guess it will be likely slower than the GTX 470 or 480. Fudzilla estimates it’ll have around 400 shader cores, and that sounds about right to us.

It’s also being reported that this card will based on the same P1025 PCB board as the GTX 470. An interesting part of this rumor – NVIDIA allegedly won’t be building a reference card spec for the GTX 460. All of the details (core speed and temperatures) will be up to the manufacturing partners to decide. Sort of an odd decision – if it’s true.

These new GTX 460 cards are set to to drop in June. While there has been reports of mass Fermi shortages at NVIDIA’s chip fabs – it seems unlikely that they would introduce a new card that uses the GF100 chips when they don’t have enough for the GTX 470 and 480 cards.

Still, these affordable mid-range cards are always good sellers, so it would be nice to see a card like the GTX 460 come out. Nothing on price, but the Radeon HD 5850 is currently selling for about $300.