Back in the summer time we've reported that NVIDIA had plans for a 55nm based version of their GT200 chip. We've learned that such a chip should have support for GDDR5 memory and naturally be able to run at least a bit faster. According to some projections, AMD hopes that even a revamped GT200 with higher clock won't be able to beat their top Radeon HD 4870 X2 offering. For NVIDIA and its partners there is a hope that the performance crown can and should be back. We also heard some rumors of a dual chip NVIDIA based card coming by the end of the year, but this is something that we cannot confirm. Though it is an option as another to go head to head in the multi-GPU segment. - FudZilla

NVIDIA Remain Quiet About the 55nm GT2x0 Release

If NVIDIA makes such a product it will definitely set some records in heat and power dissipation. The graphics market is awfully quiet, especially on the NVIDIA side, as the company simply doesn't have a winning strategy against ATI, at least not until November. The new chips, if they come, should be available by late November. We've heard that chips such as the GT200 and the G92 were NVIDIA's investment in the future. If you look close enough you will see that the GT200, a 240 shader chip is nothing more than an advanced and stronger version of the G92 architecture and this is the path that NVIDIA is taking for now.

Though at the same time, NVIDIA's harsh lesson was that the R700's innovative architecture was enough to beat NVIDIA's GT200 in the performance and high-end segments and that their architecture was simply not enough for the performance crown. At 55nm, we believe NVIDIA can and will put even more shaders at higher clocks in the new GT200 and this might be enough to get some performance increase and end up slightly faster than the R700, also known as Radeon HD 4870 X2. You've seen that removing one shader cluster makes a GeForce GTX 260 out of the GeForce GTX 280 and you could remove even more.

The big problem of this strategy is that the chip will cost the same as if you had all clusters enabled. The safe net is that you might have some chips where one of the clusters won't work properly and you should be good to launch the GeForce GTX 260 and use these wisely. The way to get rid of this issue is to design a brand new chip with seven clusters making it smaller and cheaper for some other market segments. Eventually mainstream and entry level products based on the same architecture will end up with slower clocks and less shaders.