Normally, unsubstantiated GPU-performance rumours from Taiwan concerning unannounced graphics cards earn short shrift around these parts. However, now that we know that NVIDIA's GTX 580 is real, we're inclined to give this one a little more attention.
The latest from Digitimes suggests that the green team's upcoming flagship will be powered by the GF110 core and outperform the GTX 480 by a fairly substantial margin of 20 per cent.
The report goes on to say that the company will flesh out the 500-series with the GF112, GF114 and GF119 GPUs to tide the company over until the launch of an all new architecture next year. Codenamed Kepler, the planned 28nm parts will be the true successors to Fermi, but aren't expected to arrive until the last quarter of 2011 at the earliest.
If this performance estimate is accurate, NVIDIA will be able to put up a decent challenge to the Cayman-based GPUs that AMD is going to launch in the coming weeks. The GTX 480 is already the fastest single-GPU card on the market, and a 20 percent boost is likely to allow the new card to remain competitive.
Looking at our review of the HD 6870, the new Radeon outperforms the 5770 upon which it's based by around 50 per cent. Even if AMD could replicate this increase with the jump from 5870 to 6970, AMD's new single-GPU flagship would still be a fairly even match for the GTX 580. However, the dual-GPU Antilles-based HD 6990 is unlikely to be challenged for the title of the world's fastest graphics-card.
For now, only time will tell how well these chips will perform, but it's certainly shaping up to be an interesting end to the year.
