14 DAY TRIAL // The market seems to be in an uproar over the approach of the GeForce GTX 400 graphics cards, which NVIDIA is set to officially launch at PAX 2010. These cards will be the first of its products to support DirectX 11 and are powered by the GF100 Fermi GPU, which NVIDIA claims is the most powerful graphics processing unit ever built. Of course, whether this is true or not will be established by reviewers and tech experts, but there is no doubt that the products have generated high expectations. In tune with the thirst for more info on the cards, a series of new pictures of the GTX 480 have emerged.
Until recently, any information on NVIDIA's upcoming DirectX 11 graphics cards was very hard to come by, mostly because the GPU maker was very secretive, and still is, about its Fermi architecture.
This is the main reason why anything uncovered about the cards was pure speculation, until very recently, when the actual specifications of the adapters made themselves known. The GTX 480 has 480 CUDA cores, 1536MB GDDR5 at 3696MHz, a GPU clock of 700MHz, a 384-bit memory interface and a shader frequency of 1401MHz. NVIDIA's high-end solution also has two PCI Express power connectors (one 6-pin and one 8-pin), as well as dual-DVI and HDMI outputs.
Now that end-users finally have something concrete to look forward to, it makes sense for the web to keep fueling that excitement with more and more leaks. In this case, the pictures are close-up shots of the final model and of its dual-slot cooling module. The heatsink appears to cover the whole board and uses four heatpipes and a single fan to disperse heat. Also, as a bonus, there is even a picture where the card is placed alongside Sapphire's ATI Radeon HD 5970.
NVIDIA promised that the GeForce GTX 480 and 470 would support not only DirectX 11, but also PhysX, CUDA and 3D Vision Surround. The formal introduction will be done on March 26.
