It seems AMD wasn’t very pleased with the fact that NVIDIA was trying to launch GT200 before AMD got a chance to present RV770 to the world. The GT200 launch seem to be set for middle of June, the 18th to be more precise, which would have coincided with AMD’s launch of RV770. AMD therefore decided to speed up its launch by moving it to the 16th, which doesn’t really change much, but now RV770 will be first on the market. And yes, GT200 has been renamed from the 9900 series to GTX 200 series. The GeForce 9900GTX will now be GTX 280 and 9900GTS will become GTX 260. We’re not certain what NVIDIA will do to the already existing 9800GTX at this time.
The only problem is that the chips are targeting two different price and market segments. RV770 is, and has always been, a mid-range chip, and GT200 the extreme high-end. AMD will compete with GT200 with its dual-chip 4870X2 card, while NVIDIA will compete with RV770 by stripping down GT200 into several more or less crippled versions. Just like it did with G92.
