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.

GeForce 9 roadmap revealed, 9800 GX2

The new budget-friendly 9600 GT (pictured) already has plenty of folks excited, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. NVIDIA's new GeForce 9-series has a top-end 9800 GX2 card slated for March 11th -- if these rumors are to be believed -- that is supposed to best the 8800 Ultra's performance by a solid 30 percent. The card is supposed to land for less than $599, but if that's a bit much for you, the 9800 GTX should hit for under $399 in "late March," with the 9800 GT following on April 3rd for under $299. If all of this is too much horsepower for you, the 9600 GS, 9500 GT and 9500 GS are slated to arrive in May, June and July, respectively, and all should hit at under the 9600 GT's already friendly sub-$200 pricepoint. AMD's latest offerings are pretty dang cheap as well, and aren't slouching in the benchmarks, so it's certainly a good time to be a PC gamer.