Earliest possible date is towards the end of the second quarter

Mar 11, 2010 14:58 GMT  ·  By

There is no doubt that the currently most highly anticipated consumer products, at least as far as graphics are concerned, are the upcoming GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics cards from NVIDIA. These two devices are set to debut at the end of the month and have been on the minds of most end-users that follow the news. Nevertheless, they are not the only matters of interest, with other concerns being the possibility of introducing dual-GPU Fermi cards.

Unfortunately, Fudzilla reports that hopefuls will have to live with their thirst for dual-Fermi for a while longer. Already, the single-GPU GTX cards have been delayed for months and, as such, it is no surprise to find out that a dual-core version won't come out very soon.

According to the sources of the report, one can even remotely hope to see a dual-Fermi at the end of the second quarter at the earliest. No doubt, this delay is owed to the thermal dissipation issues and general card complexity that have already impacted upon the timely delivery of the adapters set to be released at PAX 2010.

This said, it seems that ATI's Radeon HD 5970 will keep its title as the fastest card for a while more. This also implies that there is no immediate threat to the marketing performance of the upcoming 4GB HD 5970 cards that ASUS, XFX and Sapphire plan to bring out. Of course, there is no doubt that NVIDIA is not happy about this delay, but a later launch date is always preferable to a job half done.

There is some good news on NVIDIA's front, however. The company is also planning on developing more affordable Fermi graphics processing units, so that its DirectX 11 can be brought to the mainstream and entry-level markets. Products based on these chips will supposedly make it out by summer.