Rumor: Nvidia Prepping to Launch Kepler in February
In a move to address AMD's Radeon HD 7970's performance, Nvidia looks to have pushed its scheduled release of the GTX 680 to February over from the previously planned March/April to go along with Ivy Bridge's release.
A rumor from Chinese forums Chiphell suggests that Nvidia has pushed up the release of the GeForce GTX 680 to February, over previous planned March/April time frame. The source says the GTX 680 should be competitive in performance with the HD 7970. The GTX 680 will have a clock speed of 780 MHz, which is similar to the GTX 580. It will come with 2 GB of memory. It is suggested that the card with have a 512-bit memory bus but this has neither been confirmed nor are there much details of the final specifications for the GTX 680.
Based on the leaked information, the card doesn't look like it will be Nvidia's fastest next-generation GeForce Kepler chip. It sounds more like the GK107 chip with a 128-bit memory bus previously discussed in December. Hopefully Nvidia isn't rushing its next generation GPU to the market, as this writer remembers the GTX 280 release. That card didn't shake some of its noise and heat concerns until the GTX 285.

I own a GTX 285, I allready have 512 bus!
Sounds alot like what AMD said about bulldozer and Sandy Bridge. Remember how that turned out?
february will have 7950 availability (jan 31), 78xx cards debuting. this will get very interesting. XD
btw, is the gpu called 680? so the rumor about 6xx being oem was wrong...
If this is so and it is merely "competitive" with the AMD 7970 then I would say Nvidia is in for some hard times this generation cause the day of release AMD will just undercut Nvidia on price and steal sales.
Im not buying a thing until Nvidia releases this then wait for the AMD price drop and hello new 7970.
As a customer I say THANK YOU !
:-)
that they were right and in many applications it is more than competitive for its price range, and only showed bad benchmarks in single core performance, and the occasional hic up that could be fixed in a service pack update, with the whole cpu being addressed in most likely windows 8? i mean thats just how i remember it, i wouldn't recommend one, od say phenom over bulldozer for most applications, but if you are mulit core driven, and want to gamble on a service pack update taking the cpu to higher performance than an i7, than i would say go for it...
just like i would never recomend nvidia due to some of the major driver issues they have had in the past, like killing their own card bad... i dont remember amd ever doing that, though they may be a bit slower on the driver side.
i wouldn't buy any high end card unless you have an opencl/cuda application that can use it now... id wait for the 8 or 9000 series to get a high end card, for now, id look at the higher mid range area, more than enough to play most games maxed, and give you great performance on what cant be maxed... than once the wiiu and 720 come out and tessellation is put into most if not all games, you can find out what card works best for your games.
+1
and to further that, nVidia should just calm down themselves and make sure it's right from the jump.
and do not like what was quoted with the GTX 280 release, I was there for that too..
by more testing and finishing touches will also weed out the ones who think they are nVidia enthusiast.
I'll be waiting.