According to sources on the conference floor the card will ship with considerable overclocking potential despite the reduced complexity of the GF104 core when compared to the current and more advanced GF100. This should however  work in Nvidia’s favour by reducing overall production costs for the GTX 460. 

 

Fudzilla reports that the upcoming GPU should feature a 180W TDP (thermal design power) at stock frequencies and will incorporate just 768MB of GDDR5 memory. Despite this the card’s 192-bit memory bus should enable the GTX 460 to deliver more bandwidth than Radeon HD 5770, which will arguably be the unit’s closest competitor. 

 

In addition to this the GTX 460 will feature 240 cores – half of that found in Nvidia’s flagship GPU, the GTX 280. As a result this should place the GTX 460 solidly within the mid market graphical range. 

 

The GTX 260 is reportedly expected to be released in July and will mark Nvidia’s most recent addition to its Fermi range which incorporates a 40nm manufacture process as well as DirectX 11 support. 

 

No indication at which pricing point the GTX 460 will retail has yet been given. 

 

Although the company appears to be forging ahead strongly with its new product line it is important to bear in mind that it has been somewhat behind in delivering DirectX 11 compatible GPUs. As a result Nvidia’s closest, and arguably only competitor AMD has succeeded in capturing a greater portion of the market share by delivering the world’s first DirectX 11 GPUs, the HD 5800 series, as early as September 2009. 

 

In contrast Nvidia released its GeForce 400 series in April 2010.