Nvidia is reportedly ready to introduce its new GeForce 9600 GSO graphics cards in order to fight AMD's upcoming graphics cards in the Radeon 4800 series. The soon-to arrive GeForce 9600 GSO will be a direct competitor to AMD's unreleased Radeon HD 3830 graphics card and is alleged to fill the gap between the already existing 9600 GT and the upcoming 9600 GS.

According to Nvidia's manufacturing partners, the first 9600 GSO models will be available in early May, but most of the manufacturers have not yet set prices for their new products. However, XFX is sure to be the first one on the market with a 9600 GSO offering. However, EVGA is the first Nvidia partner to officially boast its 9600 GSO product.

EVGA will release two cards, both based on the 65nm-built G92 chip, with 96 shader units aboard. The first offering is a regular 9600 GSO version and will arrive on the market with a 550 MHz GPU, 1375 MHz shader clock and 1600 MHz GDDR3 clock. The Superclocked version of the card will come with its GPU, shader units and memory clocked at 650, 1620 and 1900 MHz, repsectively.

Both models from EVGA will support a 192-bit memory interface, 38MB of GDDR3 memory, PCI-Express 2.0 and DirectX 10.0 capabilities. Nvidia's beloved manufacturing partner did not announce pricing or availability for either of its 9600 GSO-based offerings.

MSI will also introduce at least one graphics card based on the 9600 GSO graphics processor. According to some undisclosed sources at the company's manufacturing facility, the first units of its new card will arrive on the market on May 13.

MSI's offering is expected to come with the same G92-150 core as the 8800 GS model, except for some minor tweaks in the core, shader and memory clocks.