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NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 570 exists, and will hit retail in December 2010. The GTX 570 is also based on the GF110 chipset, and will have 480 CUDA cores. Meanwhile, AMD has officially announced that its Radeon HD 6900 Series will be launched on December 13. It would be pretty interesting if the cards from both camps launch on the same day.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 in December 2010

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 flagship, based on a fully-enabled GF110 chipset was launched on November 9.

A slightly watered-down version of the GF110, or rather chips that do not meet the GeForce GTX 580 spec, will be placed on the upcoming GeForce GTX 570. The GF110 chip on the GeForce GTX 570 will have one streaming multiprocessor disabled, bringing the total CUDA core count to 480 – the same as the outgoing GeForce GTX 480. Performance is said to be around the GTX 480’s level, but with a TDP quite similar to the GTX 470. No further specifications are available, but we would expect 1280MB memory on the new card.

Our source tipped us that some of NVIDIA’s partners have mentioned that the GTX 570 is confirmed for December, so we’ll just have to wait for it to drop.

AMD launches Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 on December 13

AMD has officially responded that they will launch the Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 late – on December 13 – from November 22, citing market performance and availability of currently available products.

PR speak aside, we are thinking the delay is simply due to the Radeon HD 6970 being not competitive enough against the GeForce GTX 580, or in a worse case scenario, it is just about as fast as the soon-to-be-launched GeForce GTX 570. Therefore, AMD is making last minute tweaks to operating frequencies (and hence why partners did not receive any final BIOS so far).