NVIDIA readying GeForce 8800 GT for this month?

NVIDIA intends to head off upcoming video cards from AMD by moving up the schedule of its own mid-range hardware, claim Taiwanese graphics card makers. The company has reportedly shifted the release of its upcoming GeForce 8800 GT video card from November 12th to October 29th to beat AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2950 Pro to shelves and potentially take more sales in the market -- an especially cutthroat move when both cards are expected to be some of the most popular for their price/performance ratios, the sources say.

The unannounced 8800 GT is so far known to be a scaled-down version of the high-end 8800 GTS, and would use a 65-nanometer chipmaking process to shrink the card to a single slot at the expense of a narrower 256-bit memory bus (versus 384-bit) and a 512MB memory cap versus 640MB for the GTS. Its clock speeds, however, would be raised to at least 600MHz for the core and 1.8GHz for memory. AMD's Radeon HD 2950 Pro will take a similar approach.

The cost of either rival card is unknown but should float between $250 and $300. NVIDIA is also known to be planning a sequel to the lower-cost GeForce 8600 that should release in a similar timeframe, though its specifications are less certain than for the 8800 GT model.