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Because it has lost the competitive edge in the high-performance graphics card market segment, NVIDIA is expected to release a new version of its GTX 260. The new GeForce card will be designed to compete with AMD's current lineup of Radeon graphics cards and to provide a new level of performance, compared with the company's current GTX 260 card. However, accomplishing this does raise some issues, as Digitimes reports.
The new cards should improve the graphics performance of GeForce GTX 260 cards, while keeping the price tag in roughly the same range. Naturally, this could prove an important upgrade for end-users, but things might turn out the other way around for graphics card makers. According to the sources cited by Digitimes, the upcoming cards could become the main reason for an overstock problem with the previous version of the GeForce GTX 260. That is because users will likely choose the new cards, over the initial models, if pricing for them remains the same.
The new and improved GeForce GTX 260 is expected to feature the D10U-102 core, which will be manufactured by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) on the same 65nm process technology used on the current line of GTX 260 cards. However, the major difference between the two will be in the number of stream processors each card will provide. While the old model comes with 192 stream processors, the new GPU has 216. As far as the card's frequency levels are concerned, it appears that they will remain the same for both cards, with 576MHz for the GPU and 1242MHz for the memory.
As noted above, the upgraded GeForce GTX 260 is believed to go on sale with a price tag close to the previous card, but while delivering a 5-10% performance boost. This is the reason why users are likely to choose the upgraded model over the first version of the GTX 260 card.