AMD officially lifted the curtain today on its much-anticipated Radeon HD 5970, a dual-GPU solution which as of today has become the world's fastest graphics card on the market. Packed with some pretty impressive specs, the new card outclasses the competition in every benchmark thrown at it with ease, and puts AMD at the head of the high-end graphics segment for the first time in a long while.
Not one to just sit on the sidelines and let its rival get all the glory, Nvidia is hoping to build some anticipation for its upcoming DirectX 11 lineup by showing a picture of what appears to be the first working sample of a 40nm, GF100 desktop card based on the Fermi architecture. Posted on the company's Facebook account, the picture shows a black GeForce-branded card installed on an ASUS Rampage II Extreme LGA 1366 motherboard, running Uningine's Heaven DirectX 11 benchmark on a Dell 24-inch monitor.
Details are scarce, as even the corner showing framerates has been cut off, but from what little we can see the card covers two slots and packs an 8-pin plus 6-pin PCI Express connector, meaning it can suck up to 300W and will likely provide healthy overclocking headroom. Expectations are running quite high for Nvidia's answer to the Radeon HD 5800 series, although clock and overall performance numbers remain unknown.