GeForce 9900 inserted to fight Radeon HD 4800?

On the web rumors are floating everywhere that NVIDIA decided to accelerate the launch of its GeForce 9900 series flagship cards to beat out AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4800. The very top-end GeForce 9900 GTX and its close counterpart the GeForce 9900 GTS are now reportedly due as soon as July, replacing the 9800 GTX after the earlier card has spent just three months on store shelves. The revised 8800 GTS is also expected to disappear.

The underlying advantages of the 9900 are still unknown, although NVIDIA has already said the architecture behind the flagship will be extraordinarily complex with as many as one billion transistors on the GTX. The chip designer is rumored to be separating the GTX and GTS primarily by their memory bandwidth, with the GTX supporting a full 512-bit interface and the GTS scaling back to a 448-bit interface. Such a change would likely dictate unusual memory limits: the GTX would come equipped with either 512MB or 1GB of video memory and the GTS given either 640MB or 768MB.

Prices and clock speeds for the new GeForce chips aren't confirmed.