Now, this should be a bit shocking even for the biggest NVIDIA fans: the Santa Clara-based graphics manufacturer will be announcing today the release of its new graphics card lineup. By doing so, NVIDIA is going to beat AMD to being the first to release its next-generation video cards. As with all other new NVIDIA cards, after the official announcement, the company's channel partner will also announce its new GeForce lineup.

As we said before, the new GTX 280 and GTX 260 cards are among the most anticipated releases of this year. By now, we have already gotten familiar with the specs and the details of the cards, and all we have been waiting for was NVIDIA's decision to go official with the new product lineup. Next in line are the new ATI Radeons, which are still to be officially launched. The HD 4850 and 4870 have also been featured in the news pretty much as of late and, by now, we know almost everything there is to know about the cards.

Both cards are going to provide high amounts of graphic power, but the GTX 280 is poised to become NVIDIA's next flagship card. This model will come with a GPU clock speed of 602 MHz, and 1 GB of GDDR3 memory. The 240 processors cores (formerly known as shaders) will be clocked at 1296 MHz, while memory is going to benefit from a maximum speed of 2214 MHz. As we already told you, these clock rates might seem rather strange when compared with NVIDIA's previous cards.

The lower version (which will also come in a dual-slot form factor), is going to come with a GPU clock speed of 576 MHz and will only have 192 processors cores, which will be clocked at 1242 MHz. As for memory, the GTX 260 will provide 896 MB of GDDR3 running at 1998 MHz.

The cards will be built on a PCI-E 2.0 interface and are expected to provide incredible amounts of graphics power. What is yet to be confirmed is the cards' support for the new NVIDIA technology, CUDA. With this new GPGPU technology (General-purpose computing on graphics units), regular software applications can be accelerated by the graphics processor.

We will bring you more on the subject tomorrow, when a general price list will most probably be made public by major NVIDIA partners.