NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 in March and AMD Radeon HD 6990 in April as high-end graphics heat up

By Chris Davies/Feb. 25, 2011 10:12 am EST

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 590 video card is expected to arrive in mid-March 2011, followed a month later by AMD's new Radeon HD 6990, with the staggered launch supposedly an intentional strategy AMD is adopting. According to DigiTimes' sources at graphics card manufacturers, AMD has decided to delay the HD 6990's commercial release so that NVIDIA can't review it and subsequently change its GTX 590 design.

Paranoid perhaps, but the stakes in the graphics card market are apparently higher than ever. According to the sources, dramatically falling sales of entry-level video cards – the market for which has been consumed by new processors which bundle integrated graphics – has left only the mid- and high-tier markets to play for. While sales of high-performance video cards may not be comparatively high, they do grant a halo affect to a brand.

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 is expected to use dual GF110 GPU chips, paired with 3GB of GDDR memory. As for the AMD Radeon HD 6990, that's believed to pair two APUs for a total of 3,840 stream processors.