GF100 Cards Finally Named: GTX 480 & GTX 470

Update: NVIDIA has confirmed that the Twitter account is indeed theirs, so this information is official.

With a skeptical eye towards Twitter, a post was made on the NVIDIAGeForce account 4 hours ago announcing the names of the first two GF100 cards. As we’re largely sure this is a legitimate NVIDIA account we’re going to go ahead and post this information, but please keep in mind that we have not yet been able to confirm that this is indeed an official NVIDIA posting (it’s 10PM on the West Coast).

With that out of the way, the post reads as follows:

Fun Fact of the Week: GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470 will be the names of the first two GPUs shipped based on our new GF100 chip!

It’s a very small piece of information so we don’t have a lot of commentary here, but the names are a little bit surprising. The names are consistent with NVIDIA’s G/GT/GTX naming scheme, but we’re not quite sure what happened with the numbers. Technically speaking NVIDIA launched their 300 series late last year with the GeForce 310, an OEM-only rebadge of the GeForce 210. But we had expected that NVIDIA would fill the rest of the 300 series with GF100 and GF100-derrived parts, similar to how the 200 series is organized with a mix of DX10 and DX10.1 capable parts. Such an expectation is also consistent with the earlier rumors on the GTX 380 and GTX 360.

Instead they've gone ahead and started the 400 series of cards with GF100, not that we’re complaining. This is great news for developers and buyers since it prevents a repeat of the GeForce 4 Ti/MX situation, but it does make us wonder what the point was in burning off a whole series number with a single bottom-tier card. And although this is an article about the 400 series, we're left wondering what the purpose is of a rebadged 300 series is since that clearly has an impact on the naming of the 400 series.

At any rate, no further information was announced. We still don't know what the performance will be like or the clock speeds. It's a good bet however that the GTX 470 will have some CUDA Cores disabled, if NVIDIA's GTX 280/270/260 naming scheme is anything to go by.