"Nvidia has finally made its Geforce GTX 460 cards official. Based the same GF104 chip that we wrote about for quite some time, this 40nm card features support for DirectX 11, and will be available as a 256-bit 1GB version and 192-bit 768MB version.

The reference GTX 460 cards have 336 CUDA cores and work at 675MHz for the GPU, 1350MHz for shaders and 3600MHz for GDDR5 memory. It has dual-DVI and mini HDMI outputs and a TDP of up to 160W. The new cards are priced at US $199 for the 768MB/192-bit version and around US $229 to US $249 for the 1GB/256-bit version.

As expected, the 768MB GTX 460 offers better performance compared to AMD's HD 5830, while the 1GB GTX 460 can cross horns with the HD 5850, and does it quite well, considering that it has more ROPs, additional L2 cache and those 256MB of memory more when compared to the 768MB GTX 460 card, all for a mere $30 more.

Of course, we're still waiting to see AMD's move, and we are quite sure that we'll see a price drop or two now that GTX 460 has shown its face on the market.

Most reviews that went online agree on the same thing, Nvidia's GTX 460 is a pretty good $200 card, and GTX 460 1GB makes more sense, so at least partners will be happy. In order not to jinx Nvidia we'll stop praising them, but finally consumers can enjoy a bit of healthy competition.

Here are some of the reviews that went online. Our review is coming shortly."