Although Nvidia Corp. was expected to release its GeForce GTX 960 graphics solution in October, 2014, a new market rumour suggests that the company will only launch its new performance-mainstream graphics card in 2015.

Nvidia is now expected to release its GeForce GTX 960 graphics cards in the first quarter of 2015, according to a report from Hermitage Akihabara. As a result, this year the company will continue to offer GeForce GTX 970 and 980 graphics cards for the high-end market as well as previous-generation products for other market segments.

Exact reasons why Nvidia decided to postpone the launch of the GeForce GTX 960 are unknown, but given the fact that the solution is expected to be based on the code-named GM204 graphics processing unit, which also powers GeForce GTX 970 and 980, it is likely that Nvidia may not have the right amount of cut-down GM204 chips to support a high-volume launch right now. The demand for the GeForce GTX 970 and 980 graphics cards seems to be very high, therefore, Nvidia uses all the chips it has to build enough high-end/high-margin graphics cards.

The lack of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 960 on the market means that the company will create additional demand for its higher-end offerings and will also let its arch-rival Advanced Micro Devices sell more graphics solutions (such as AMD Radeon R9 285 and 285X) that cost around $250.

Nvidia did not comment on the news-story.

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KitGuru Says: Keeping in mind that the GM204 chip is pretty large and expensive to manufacture, it does not make a lot of sense for Nvidia to use fully-fledged GPUs in cut-down configurations. By Q1 the company will likely collect a necessary amount of GPUs with damaged execution units that cannot be used for GeForce GTX 970 and 980 graphics cards. It makes a great sense to use such graphics chips for inexpensive solutions.

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