New NVIDIA Drivers Hint At Rest Of GeForce 400 Series

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NVIDIA’s 259.47 drivers should be coming out any moment. They’ve recently been WHQL-approved and they’ve inadvertently leaked the names of what looks like upcoming NVIDIA GeForce 400-series graphics cards. It looks like NVIDIA has a lot planned at the low-end, but nothing for the extreme-cutting-edge-high-end cards.

The rumored GTS 450 that we’ve been covering lately (and seen in some leaks from China and Eastern Europe) is featured, as are a great number of other new cards to the GeForce 400 series. Here’s the full list of cards:

- NVIDIA_DEV.0E23.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTS 455 “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DC4.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DC5.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DC0.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 440 “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DE1.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DE2.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 420 “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0E30.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DD1.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DD2.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 445M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DD3.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 435M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DF2.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 435M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DF0.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 425M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DF3.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DF1.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M “

- NVIDIA_DEV.0DEE.01 = “NVIDIA GeForce GT 415M “

As you can see, it’s quite the plethora of new graphics cards from Big Green. They’ve also got a healthy new offering of mobile offerings. It certianly looks like NVIDIA is going after the middle and low-ends of the market, but what about the high-end? The GTX 480 is a great card but performance-wise, it’s comparable to the GTX 295 in most benchmarks (Fermi-specific benefits aside) and both cards are trumped by the Radeon HD 5970.

Granted, NVIDIA and AMD make very little on their “halo cards”, the extreme high-end $500 cards, since in the long-term they’ll sell very little of them. But, having the most powerful card on the market adds a certain amount of appeal and prestige to that generation of graphics cards for the company. When will we see a GTX 495?

What’s troubling is that both our sources inside the graphics industry, as well as that of other websites aren’t saying anything about a dual-core bleeding-edge GeForce 400 card from NVIDIA. We’ve seen some card manufacturers toy around with dual-GPU PCB boards, but nothing from Big Green themselves. This leads us to believe that NVIDIA plans to stick with the GTX 480 at the high-end for now.