NVIDIA's Kepler graphics processing units may not leave people waiting quite as long as everyone originally feared.

This is one of those rumors that sound too good to be true but still bring a ray of hope to those who want a new and mighty piece of hardware.

After all, it is not every day that reports suddenly say that a long-awaited computer part will arrive two or three months faster than originally expected.

According to a forum post on Chiphell, the next high-end video card from NVIDIA has been moved up.

So far, it has been hinted that the official release of the 28nm-based Kepler GPU, and the cards based on it, won't occur before the late first / early second quarter of 2012.

Even if NVIDIA did move faster, few, if any, thought any cards would show up sooner than March.

Chiphell now says that the launch will happen in late February.

This latest report is somewhat at odds with the one we caught sight of a few days ago, where it was stated that NVIDIA didn't want to rush Kepler.

Instead, the Santa Clara, California-based company wanted to wait until it had a suitable supply of boards to sell.

Whether or not it achieves this goal in time for the new date to be met remains to be seen.

That said, the report had a few of the specifications to share as well. The GTX 680 has a 28nm GPU with a clock speed of 780 MHz (like GTX 580).

There are also 2GB of memory, plus a memory bus of either 512 bits or 256 bits, unless NVIDIA goes for the more unusual 384-bit interface. GTX 550 Ti has half that bus, 192-bit, so the decision wouldn't be out of the blue.

As always, readers should not assume this rumor is true, even though the forum member who started it (Napoleon) has a so-called history of leaking GPU info.