Geforce-gtx-480 posts

Last March, after several delays, Nvidia finally launched their first DirectX 11 PC graphics card products with the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470, However those products are on the high end in terms of price. Today Nvidia officially announced the launch of their mainstream DirectX 11-based card, the GeForce GTX 465.

Priced at around $279 (depending on which third party graphics card company you pick) the GeForce GTX 465 has 1 GB of memory and a 607MHz clock speed. Of course it support's Nvidia's SLI tech as well as PhysX and 3D Vision. Our sister site Engadget has a collection of early review links from hardware sites and for the most part they have been positive (although the card is a power hog).

As promised, graphics chip maker Nvidia used PAX East as a way to launch their first DirectX 11 graphics cards, the high end GeForce GTX 480 at $499 and the less powerful GeForce GTX 470 at $349. While this was their "launch" event, graphics cards with these chips won't actually go on sale until April 12.

The first reviews of the cards are somewhat mixed. While the GeForce GTX 480 is now considered to be the fastest graphics card you can buy, its performance was just a little bit faster than its comparable ATI competition which came out six months ago. On the other hand if you got $1,000 to spend, a SLI set up of two GeForce GTX 480-based cards cleaned house against ATI's CrossFireX. The cards will also come with some tech demos including a free game, Supersonic Sled, that's designed specifically for DirectX 11 and other high-end graphics features.

We are now less than a week away from the first ever PAX East event in Boston and as we have reported before graphics chip maker Nvidia has chosen the venue to host their big coming out part for their next generation high-end PC graphics cards. However hardware site VR Zone claims to have gotten some leaked info about both the GeForce GTX 480 and 470 cards.

The 470 model will have 1280 MB of memory for $349, according to their story, while the higher end 480 model will have 1536 MB of memory and cost $499. While these are not officially confirmed yet they do seem to be in line with previous speculation. We will be at PAX East to report on the big Nvidia launch party Friday night.

[Via Engadget]

Technically Nvidia isn't suppose to launch their next-gen graphics card until March 26 at PAX East but in the meantime the company keeps teasing us with some more info about the capabilities for their their GeForce GTX 480 and 470 products. The company put up a new YouTube video that shows off the product's DirectX 11 features, such as tessellation.

At the end of the video they also show off Nvidia's answer to ATI's Eyefinity multi-monitor tech. It's called 3D Vision Surround and lets players hook up three 1980p 3D supported monitors with the appropriate GeForce graphics card and see the view in full 3D with Nvidia's 3D Vision glasses. Yes, it's really cool but yes it's also really expensive to buy all the things needed for it to work. Our sister site Engadget has posted up a video that shows more 3D Vision Surround in action which you can check out after the jump:

On Monday Nvidia announced they would be holding a major launch event for their next-generation graphics chip at PAX East in Boston in late March. But was this just a preview event or an actual launch for their long awaited first DirectX 11 product (known as "Fermi" and also as GF100)? Now Nvidia's Twitter page has the answer.

The page's latest message states, "Apologies for the confusion around our most recent GF100 update. To clarify, launch date for GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 is March 26, 2010." Those two product numbers were previously revealed to be the first GeForce cards that would use the GF100 chip. All in all it looks like Nvidia is going all out to make their launch event at PAX East a huge deal and perhaps gain back some, if not all, of their lead they lost from AMD, who took the performance and feature lead with their first DirectX 11 graphics cards last October.

Hardcore PC hardware junkies are dying to learn more about what Nvidia plans for its next-generation graphics product. However the company has been keeping details on their launch plans close to the vest. A couple of weeks ago it revealed some technical details on the graphics chip which is known both as Fermi and GF100.

Now Nvidia's Twitter web page has announced that the first official graphics chips that will be based on the GF100 will be named the GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470. Once again that's all we know but Nvidia is expected to reveal the big details (launch date, clock speed, and cost) for their new products sometime in early March.