Nvidia will reportedly launch its next generation of graphics cards on June 18. Apart from the many architecture changes involving one billion transistors per die and the return of the NVIO chip, the graphics specialist is also cooking up a rebranding strategy. The new cards will be marketed as GeForce GTX 280 and 260, thus putting an end to the long-lasting 9xxx series.

At first the GT-200 graphics solutions will hit the market as single-chip cards. According to a news report issued by tech website Fudzilla, the big launch will take place on June 18th, two days after AMD will have introduced its ATI RV770 GPU (commercially known as ATI Radeon HD 4800).

The new naming convention will be a hard punch thrown in the face of many Nvidia customers, as they have gotten used to the system. However, it is alleged that Nvidia dropped the proposed "GeForce 9900" commercial name just to make a clear distinction between the old generation of products and the new one.

The adoption of the GeForce GTX 280 name actually makes sense, given the fact that this might be the first Nvidia graphics chip to ever be built at the 55-nanometer manufacturing node, a significant leap from the previous 65-nanometer micro-architecture. However, it is not sure whether the first 55-nanometer GT-200 chips will make it to the market in due time, but Nvidia got it covered up with a second batch of 65-nanometer GPUs.

Nvidia let some rumors slip away about the technical specifications of the new graphics chip but it never mentioned anything about a shift in naming conventions. However, Roy Taylor, the company's vice-president of Content Business Development admitted that the naming scheme got too complicated.

"It's a challenge that we're looking at right now", said Taylor, earlier this week. "There is a need to simplify it for consumers, there's no question... we think that the people who understand and know GeForce today, they're OK with it - they understand it. But if we're going to widen our appeal, there's no doubt that we have to solve that problem", he continued.