14 DAY TRIAL // End-users have undoubtedly heard more than their share of news about NVIDIA graphics-card delays. In fact, the adapters were delayed so many times, before and after they were made official, that postponing them further would not have been surprising anymore. Still, all things must come to an end and, in this case, this seems quite fortuitous, as, according to the most recent reports, the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 video boards seem to have finally reached true availability.
According to some “sources close to NVIDIA” that Fudzilla apparently contacted, the Santa Clara, California-based GPU developer managed to ship thousands of cards worldwide. This fact seems to be reflected in how the video adapters have now become available in European countries besides just France, UK, Germany and Spain.
Until recently, only a limited number of retailers had the products in stock and, even then, they charged a substantial amount of money for each of them. Some even pushed the price of the GTX 480 to almost twice the MSRP. Now, at the very least, price points seem to have returned to what they were intended. The GeForce GTX 470 will require roughly 330 Euro to be sold, whereas the high-end GTX 480 is priced at about 490 Euro. Of course, prices vary according to vendor, but at least they no longer carry tags of over 500-600 Euro.
It could be said that only now has the true face-off between AMD's and NVIDIA's DirectX 11 graphics technologies begun, at least on the high-end market. What remains is for the latter to spawn mainstream and entry-level solutions such as the GTX 460 (otherwise known as GTX 465). This new card, according to recent rumors, should show up by next month and will take on ATI's Radeon HD 5850 and Radeon HD 5830.