NVIDIA pushing up GeForce 9900

NVIDIA's been on a hyper-competitive tear lately, and while the latest rumor isn't quite on par with Roy Taylor saying that the Intel CPU is "dead," it reinforces the company's new win-at-all-costs attitude. Seems ATI's upcoming RV770-based Radeon HD 4800 might threaten NVIDIA's dominance of the high-end graphics market, and that's just not acceptable -- so the company is planning on pushing up the release of the GeForce 9900 to July. That's one billion transistors and GDDR3 memory, if you haven't been memorizing rumored graphic card specs -- we're guessing that blue screen of death will render mighty fast on that rig.

Nvidia releases their 9600 GPU

Nvidia has unveiled the first graphics processing unit (GPU) of its next-generation GeForce 9 Series that may offer the largest single-generation performance jump in the Company’s history. Introduced today, the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT GPU delivers up to 116% more performance than its predecessor.
After going to all the GeForce LANs and seeing the rigs that gamers play on, we wanted to kick off the GeForce 9 with the perfect GPU for gamers,” said Ujesh Desai, general manager of GeForce desktop GPUs at NVIDIA. “The first product to be introduced in the GeForce 9 family gives gamers the horsepower to play cutting-edge DirectX 10 games at a price they will love and can afford.”

The new GeForce 9600 GT GPU shows an improved performance-per-watt ratio compared to its predecessor as well as improved compression efficiency. In addition to 64 stream processors — each individually clocked at a blazing-fast 1625 MHz — and a 256-bit memory interface running at 900 MHz, the GeForce 9600 GT GPU is designed for the new PCIe 2.0 bus standard and features backwards compatibility with the original PCIe standard.