Nvidia Rushes GT-200 Introduction, Goes Online in July

Rumor has it that Nvidia will push forward the introduction of its upcoming GeForce 9900 series of graphics cards to some date in July. This move was expected, as the graphics specialist has to face the upcoming threat called Radeon 4800.

The first two graphics card models to come to the rescue will be the 9900 GTX and the 9900 GTS. Previous rumors claimed that Nvidia would only introduce the 9900 GT version of the card, then wait for some time until it brings in the big guns. However, since the "big guns" will in fact be brought by AMD, the company wisely chose to give the best first.

The GT-200 graphics core is the cornerstone of the whole Ge Force 9900 family and comes with impressive updates over the previous offerings. The company built it from the ground up and early rumors, partly confirmed by Nvidia executives, claim that the GT-200 core will come with 1 billion transistors aboard, as well as with a 512-bit memory interface.

While the GeForce 9900 GTX model will use a P651 PCB and will come equipped with 512-bit memory interface with the GDDR3 memory, the lower offerings in the GeForce 9900 GTS family will only feature a 448-bit memory interface with the GDDR3.

The one-billion transistor behemoth will come with about 200 shader units, and the vast majority of the electronic switches inside the silicon will be used for graphics computing. According to previous rumors, Nvidia's GT-200 die is extremely stable and the first samples of reference video-cards built around it have already been shipped to the company's manufacturing partners.

Nvidia will have to solve one issue, though, before going public with the GT-200 architecture, namely selling the 1.5 million excess GeForce 8800 graphics card its OEM partners are totally refusing.