Of course, as it sometimes happens, ominous or mind-boggling leaks manage to find their way to the Internet, always becoming cause for speculation and either anticipation or disappointment. Still, what all of such leaks have in common is that all speculations based on them are always premature, regardless if they prove true or not. This time around, what end-users have on their hands is a validity-challenged leak indeed. A Guru3D forum member posted what he or she claims are pictures of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 360 and GTX 380 benchmarks for the Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5 and STALKER Clear Sky games.

The article at Guru3D strongly advises that the benchmarks not be taken as genuine just yet, even though the general style and layout of the screenshots is at least in part similar to the one used in genuine NVIDIA benchmarking. The pictures suggest that the aforementioned GTX graphics cards can outperform the Radeon HD 5970 dual-GPU graphics card. This is the major controversial element in the pictures, besides the lack of some non-named items and the “NVIDIA Confidential” mark.

“I can confirm that the layout and style is roughly what NVIDIA uses for it's presentations, but sure a couple of things like 'NVIDIA Confidential' and some other non-named items are missing from these screenshots (hence we think they are fake)” said the Guru3D article.

Even though the shots seem too good to be true, NVIDIA will definitely score a big point on the high-end graphics market if its cards can really render the aforementioned games better than AMD's Radeon adapter. NVIDIA itself has been describing the Fermi architecture as generally better than any existing graphics technology, which would imply that a graphic card better than the HD 5970 is just what end-users should expect.

Nevertheless, until NVIDIA has something concrete to show, consumers are highly advised not to build their expectations upon this leak, or any other leaks for that matter.