14 DAY TRIAL // If you check out NVIDIA's current graphics card offer, you will see that the GeForce G92-based series has only four members: the GeForce 9600 GT, 9800 GTX, 9800 GX2 and 9600 GSO. But this is soon to change since, as we already informed you yesterday, NVIDIA is planning the release of a new GeForce 9800GTX+(plus) card, an overclocked 55nm version of the company's G92-based GeForce 9800GTX. Besides this new card, NVIDIA is also expected to bring forward a new 9800GT, a card which will try to become a competitor to AMD's Radeon HD 4850.
The Santa-Clara based graphics manufacturer clearly needs this card in order to compete with AMD's yet-to-be officially announced RV770-based Radeon 4850, since the GeForce 8800GT will clearly lose ground on the performance side when that happens.
Unfortunately, the card hasn't been confirmed by NVIDIA yet, at least not in the way that it happened with the 9800GTX+, so we can't tell for certain what it will pack as far as performance goes. All we can speculate on at this point is that the 9800GT is also going to be built on a 55nm fabrication process but, unlike the 9800GTX+, it is going to come with a single slot cooler, just like the HD 4850.
The GeForce 9800GT will most likely be built on the same PCB as the 9800GTX+, but will come with a "crippled" GPU and with some disabled clusters. This is meant to lower the card's performance and to make it more affordable for the consumer market.
At this time, the new card is believed to arrive sometime around July 15, but it could be delayed as the release of the new entry-level GeForce 9500 chip has also been pushed back to late July. Clearly, NVIDIA is waiting for AMD to make its move first before launching the new GeForce 9000 series cards.