Few GeForce GTX 470/480 cards at launch

The colleagues over at DigiTimes reports thats second-tier graphics card makers are unlikely to start shipping large volumes of NVIDIA Fermi based graphics cards until April, which matches to what we have been sayin.

XFX and PNY are apparently already confirmed to be among the first wave of GeForce GTX 470/480 card manufacturers, with prices expected to be around $499.99 and $679.99 respectively.

Second-tier graphics card makers are unlikely to start mass shipments of their Nvidia GeForce GTX 480/470-based (Fermi) graphics cards until April despite that Nvidia plans to announce the GPU on March 26 since most of the them have not yet received complete reference board designs, according to sources from graphics card makers.

The sources expect Nvidia will give supply priority to first-tier makers or makers that only produce Nvidia cards. Makers including XFX and PNY are already offering pre-orders for these upcoming cards with GTX 480 priced at around US$679.99 and GTX 470 at about US$499.99.

Some market watchers originally expected AMD to drop its graphics card price to counter the launch of Nvidia's new cards, but since the prices of Nvidia cards are higher than AMD's existing cards, watchers now believe any price war between the two chip makers is unlikely to start until after May.