Nvidia appears to be in a real big hurry to cut into the momentum for AMD's forthcoming Radeon 6900 series of graphics cards. Its rumored answer -- the GeForce GTX 580 -- is not only being prepped to compete with (and beat) AMD's latest -- but it also appears to be coming as soon as next week.

A launch date of November 8 has leaked via a Chinese Web site, and another Chinese site has published some benchmarks comparing the new card to the GTX 480 and the Radeon 5870. The good news for the green giant: The average gain for the GTX 580 is around 17 percent over its Fermi predecessor and a whopping 45 percent better than the 5870. Of course, we don't know how it compares to the forthcoming Radeon 6970 and 6950, and that's ultimately the only thing that matters.

The performance gains come in part from the doubling of the 480's texture mapping units to 128 and increasing the number of CUDA cores to 512 from 480. Thermal design power is down slightly to 244W (from 250W), but it looks like Nvidia is still low-balling that measurement since the 480 runs at full load closer to 300W.

The GTX 580 is rumored to be offered for $499, which will help drive down the 480's price tag and will probably match the pricing for the eventual 6970. Assuming the 580 launch goes smoothly (never a given with Nvidia these days), it should set up an epic battle for graphics supremacy later this month.

[Via VR-Zone]