Fermi finally tips up -

After months and months and months of waiting, gamers rejoice, because Nvidia’s Fermi is finally here.

Announced by Nvidia’s GM of  GeForce, Drew Henry, at Boston’s Pax East the card is apparently “without a doubt,the best GPU [Nvidia] ever built.” Henry also said he was sure "the GeForce GTX 480 is something you're going to be really delighted with."

Not telling us anything we didn’t know before, Henry went on to say Fermi was "the most complicated GPU [Nvidia] ever built,” boasting three billion transistors, so roughly the same as four Intel quad core i7 CPUs.

Henry bragged that Fermi actually had such advanced compute capabilities that it would allow gamers to “blow some shit up." We can only assume gamers will be delighted.

The GTX 480, said Henry, has a 1.5 GB frame buffer and 480 cores whilst the GTX 470 has a 1.2 GB frame buffer and 448 cores .

Nvidia is claiming that the 480 is some 2x faster than Nvidia’s older GTX 285. Henry also maintained the firm had invested a lot in PhysX.

For added incentive, Nvidia is apparently also shipping an interactive ray tracing app with every new GTX 470 and 480.

Throwing out a rather flimsy excuse for why Fermi tipped up so late, Henry asserted Nvidia had wanted to wait until PAX because that was the show all the gamers came to. 

Henry waxed lyrical about the passion of gamers and how laudable it was that some had driven 40 hours across country from Washington to be there and how others had packed up to 11 people in one hotel room to attend.

Nvidia had better just hope that with all that passion abounding, it doesn’t disappoint potential punters with a weak supply. Then again, that might just be TSMC’s fault.