The world is full of time zones and the simultaneous launch of Fermi, Geforce GTX 480 and 470 will happen on March 26th, at 15.00 Pacific Standard Time (Pacific coast), 18.01 East Coast time, 23.01 British standard times and Central Europeans will see the first reviews on the March 27th at 00:01, or what we call midnight.
We can only speculate that Nvidia waited for the New York stock exchange to close before it launches the card, to let the stocks possibly rise or fall over the weekend.
The opinions
will definitely be divided as tonight, it’s highly unlikely that you will be
able to buy a card. There might be some cards here and there, but real
availability can be expected on April 12th, only in case if Nvidia doesn’t
shift this date again.
Performance
wise, in some test and heavy AA and Anisotropic settings powered with super high
resolutions, you will see somewhere between 20 to even 50 percent performance
increase over Radeon 5870, but do have in mind that at this settings Fermi,
Geforce GTX 480 loses to the dual-GPU Radeon 5970, which will remain the fastest
card on market.
In most
games Fermi should end up slightly faster than Radeon HD 5870. Be sure to
return at midnight as we might have much more scores for you as we are testing
the card as we speak. Stay tuned for more.