The world has been buzzing over the past week or so with all sorts of little bits and pieces of information (leaked photos, leaked tech specs, spy shots, etc.) regarding the upcoming Fermi-based GPU family from NVIDIA, the GTX 400 series. And now, after such a long wait, the GPU manufacturer has finally decided to go official, releasing two of the top models in the series, the GTX 480 and GTX 470 (well, which we actually expected to see arrive on the market anyway).

As far as we can see, the leaked tech/pricing info regarding these two new DirectX 11-supporting GPUs were pretty right on the money. So, the GTX cards both incorporate CUDA and NVIDIA PhysX, but also 3D Vision, 3D Vision Surround, and Pure Video technologies.

The more powerful of the two cards, the GTX 480, features 480 CUDA cores, 1536MB GDDR5 memory running at 1848 Mhz (177.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth), and can deliver a maximum digital resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels. The card comes packed with a Mini HDMI and two Dual Link DVI interfaces, but its biggest problems are related to the power consumption and heat generation, since we're talking about 250W in full load, plus a maximum temperature of around 105 Celsius degrees (which explains those fancy-looking heatsinks on the exterior). Pricing for this flagship model will sadly be extremely high, since we're talking about somewhere in the vicinity of 500 US dollars.

The second model initially released by NVIDIA, the GTX 470, is a bit more “human” in terms of pricing, since it will cost just around 390 US dollars, but, naturally, the level of performance has also been scaled down a bit. So, in this case, we're talking just about 448 Cores, 1280MB GDDR5 memory, as well as a power consumption limited to 215W.

And one more thing before we go. As far as the early reviews have shown, the GTX 480 doesn't manage to provide that much of a performance, at least when compared to its direct competitor, the single-core ATI HD5870. We're talking about a performance increase ranging between 5 and 10 percent in certain titles, but this boost comes at the price of increased noise, heat, power consumption and a hefty difference in the price point department. Of course, we'll have to wait until NVIDIA provides us with a test sample and proves us wrong (or right), but until then, this seems to be the preliminary conclusion.



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