Nvidia Corp. said on Monday that it would officially launch its next-generation graphics cards for gamers on the 26^th of March, 2010. The company is six month late with its new GeForce GTX 400-series graphics boards, however, Nvidia is confident that the novelty based on the Fermi architecture will open up new performance heights.

“The wait is almost over! The world's fastest PC graphics gaming technology will be unveiled at PAX 2010,” a statement by Nvidia reads. PAX East is a three-day game festival for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers, which will take place from March 26 to March 28, 2010 in Boston Massachussets.

Nvidia promises that at PAX East it will not only publicly demonstrate its latest graphics technology, but also to start sales of actual GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480 graphics boards, the first DirectX 11-capable products from the Santa Clara, California-based designer of graphics chips.

ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices and the arch-rival of Nvidia, initiated sales of its ATI Radeon HD 5800-series graphics cards on the 23^rd of September, 2009, about six month ahead of Nvidia.

The flagship Fermi graphics processor will feature 512 stream processing engines (which are organized as 16 streaming multi-processors with 32 cores in each) that support a type of multi-threading technology to maximize utilization of cores. Each stream processor has a fully pipelined integer arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and floating point unit (FPU). The top-of-the-range chip contains 3 billion of transistors, features 384-bit memory GDDR5 memory controller with ECC and features rather unprecedented 768KB unified level-two cache as well as rather complex cache hierarchy in general. Naturally, the Fermi family is compatible with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.x and OpenCL 1.x application programming interfaces (APIs). The new chips will be made using 40nm process technology at TSMC.

Tags: Nvidia, Fermi, Geforce, Quadro, Tesla, NV60, GF100, 40nm