The current Geforce GTX 260 has 192 Shaders and it looks that the new one will have 216. The story is quite simpe. The GT200 core has 10 units with each featuring 24 Shaders and instead of eight clusters enabled with the old GTX 260, Nvidia will enable nine.
The new card should be available at some point in September
and it definitely win over Radeon 4870. That is the whole point and it looks like the new GTX 260 will end up around $50 more expensive than the current
ones.
It looks like that this is the first „new“ product that will
try to consolidate its roadmap in the war against ATI. ATI came out strong and this
time Nvidia has a better answer than simply renaming its current products, it
will slightly alter them and market them as new.