During recently held Financial Analyst Day 2011, Drew Henry, General Manager of GeForce Business Unit at nVidia talked about product positioning for desktop and mobile platforms.

His key takeaways were existing and upcoming games, which should drive the market up. Key titles are Batman: Arkham City, Crysis 2, Duke Nukem Forever and Diablo III. When it comes to actual GeForce products, Drew talked about GeForce GTX 580, 560 Ti and revealed that next week, nVidia will launch GeForce GTX 550 Ti.

According to Drew, GeForce GTX 550 Ti will target the $150 segment, which is currently crowded not just with GeForce GTS 450, but also with heavily discounted GTX 460 boards. We don’t know how the 550 Ti will perform, but with Newegg.com offering GTX 460 SE and GTX 460 768MB at that price bracket, the newcomer has some big shoes to fill.

Direct competitor will be Radeon HD 5700 Series, which is set to be rebranded into HD 6700 Series, as AMD did not plan to develop the mainstream version of its Northern Islands GPU architecture. The reason for it is quite simple and goes by the name of Llano family of Fusion APUs (GPU+CPU), which is scheduled for debut in desktop and notebook computers during April-May timeframe.

Final specs and the performance of this new mainstream card should be unveiled next week.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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