GeForce GTX 400

Yesterday, NVIDIA officially paper launched their new GeForce GTX 400 series GPUs (GF100 was just the code name). It turns out that twitter announcement they made last month was just to say they were going to introduce the GF100 at the PAX East trade show. An announcement about an announcement? Lame!

Apparently this slight of hand misdirection upset a lot of people in the gaming community so they had to make a tweeter apology:

Apologies for the confusion around our most recent GF100 update. To clarify, launch date for GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 is March 26, 2010.

After reading some reviews it appears this card has regained the GPU speed crown (I was unaware that ATI has had the fastest cards for quite some time and that the GF100 was painfully late), however NVIDIA seems to have done it at the expense of running the cards hot and loud. Not that I'm into PC gaming anymore, but if I was going to build another system, it would be designed to run cool and quiet.

The demos look sweet but you need one of these new GTX 400's to run them which won't be shipping for a few weeks. I was curious to see how the ray tracing demo looked in real time. Rob was right though, they are using some sort of hybrid technique to display the image, rather than a full real-time ray tracing engine.