While competitor AMD is shipping circuits faster than they can make them, NVIDIA is tearing its hair to finalize its graphics cards based on the Fermi architecture. Fermi has been in the news for some time, as NVIDIA has talked a lot about the potential of the technology, shown fake prototypes and gossiped about performance. During CES it decided to show its coming GF100 card using the new Fermi architecture.
Physically the card looks like any other GeForce card and it is surprisingly compact, only 26cm long, even though its houses a GPU with 3 billion transistors. The card ships with power connectors able to supply up to 300W, which is a lot for a single-GPU graphics card.
NVIDIA offered no hints on the performance the card, but we know for sure that it is hoping to claim every segment of the market. During CES it presented its GF100 card in the acknowledged DirectX 11 test Unigine Heaven, but also a tailored graphics demo running 3-way SLI with GF100 cards.
Three Fermi cards adds up to nearly 10 billion transistors in raw graphics power, which is a considerable amount. A video presentation of Rocket Sled has been published on YouTube and can be found below.
Fermi is alive at last, but the launch date is still no more specific than March 2010.
