Update: NVIDIA has confirmed that the Twitter account is indeed theirs, so this information is official.

With a skeptical eye towards Twitter, a post was made on the NVIDIAGeForce account 4 hours ago announcing the names of the first two GF100 cards. As we’re largely sure this is a legitimate NVIDIA account we’re going to go ahead and post this information, but please keep in mind that we have not yet been able to confirm that this is indeed an official NVIDIA posting (it’s 10PM on the West Coast).

With that out of the way, the post reads as follows:

Fun Fact of the Week: GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 will be the names of the first two GPUs shipped based on our new GF100 chip!

It’s a very small piece of information so we don’t have a lot of commentary here, but the names are a little bit surprising. The names are consistent with NVIDIA’s G/GT/GTX naming scheme, but we’re not quite sure what happened with the numbers. Technically speaking NVIDIA launched their 300 series late last year with the GeForce 310, an OEM-only rebadge of the GeForce 210. But we had expected that NVIDIA would fill the rest of the 300 series with GF100 and GF100-derrived parts, similar to how the 200 series is organized with a mix of DX10 and DX10.1 capable parts. Such an expectation is also consistent with the earlier rumors on the GTX 380 and GTX 360.

Instead they've gone ahead and started the 400 series of cards with GF100, not that we’re complaining. This is great news for developers and buyers since it prevents a repeat of the GeForce 4 Ti/MX situation, but it does make us wonder what the point was in burning off a whole series number with a single bottom-tier card. And although this is an article about the 400 series, we're left wondering what the purpose is of a rebadged 300 series is since that clearly has an impact on the naming of the 400 series.

At any rate, no further information was announced. We still don't know what the performance will be like or the clock speeds. It's a good bet however that the GTX 470 will have some CUDA Cores disabled, if NVIDIA's GTX 280/270/260 naming scheme is anything to go by.

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  • osmosum - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link

    The Sum-FPS benchmark gives 0 points for a game if it cannot play at that resolution. ATI cards wind up playing the least amount of games when compared to Nvidia. Thats all I need to know who to buy. I dont have time to fiddle with settings to make *any* video card work, it just better, off the bat.

    Oz
  • vidianess - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link

    when fermi comes out all ati/amd DX11 cards will be obsolete.
  • Galid - Tuesday, February 23, 2010 - link

    When Fermi comes out, It will itself be obsolete mr.Fanboy.
  • cactusdog - Friday, February 5, 2010 - link

    Wrong,when fermi comes out ATI wont be obsolete. It will still be a hell fast DX11 card that will play any game at the highest resolutions for the next couple of years. Fermi being slighty faster doesnt make ATI obsolete. Obsolete is what ATI did to Nvidia when they released a DX11 card. Nvidia had nothing so their GTX 2XX series became obsolete.
  • mindless1 - Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - link

    You couldn't be more wrong. Show us titles using significant DX11 features, it is necessary for DX10 parts, from ATI included, to be obsolete. Only a handful of games have any DX11 features at all.

    Instead what matters is performance at the games people are playing.

    What is worse for nVidia is the lower performance per dollar.
  • AdamB5000 - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link

    Isn't everything in the computer world obsolete after about five minutes? I buy obsolete parts every time I upgrade my pc. My HD5750 just arrived today! Yay!
  • StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link

    Could you be any more of a fan boy? At least most people try to hide it...

    I like ATI as much as the next guy... (Who doesn't like an under-dog?)

    However ATI have out-done themselves this time around, I just hope nVidia doesn't do another Geforce FX on us again, otherwise there won't be the competition to drop the prices more. :(
  • GeorgeH - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link

    The only real pity here is that your ridiculous fanboi manifesto isn’t more succinct.
  • ratbert1 - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link

    move along, nothing to see here...
  • Bob Smith - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 - link

    move along, nothing to see here...

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