The final details of NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX have escaped ahead of their public debut and promise a tangible though not dramatic boost to performance, says an anonymous poster with access to reportedly leaked presentation slides. The new single-chipset flagship card will clock at 675MHz for its core (versus 575MHz for the 8800 GTX) as well as a 1.1GHz memory speed (up from 900MHz). The internal shader engine for pixels and geometry will also jump from 1.35GHz to 1.69GHz, the leak indicates. However, the switch to a newer architecture will actually reduce the total video memory from 768MB to 512MB.

This will not result in a performance drop, benchmarks show: most games will be playable at 50 frames per second or higher with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering. Adding a second or third card for NVIDIA's SLI mode is also said to either improve frame rates in games by 2 or 2.5 times as much, making some games playable or smoother at previously impractical resolutions and settings.

Price will also be one of the key advantages to the card, if the report is proven accurate. Cards are due to be announced on March 25th and should sell between $299 and $349 depending on the vendor and the card's features. Previous rumors have suggested a hard launch with cards available almost immediately.