Unreleased Nvidia card spotted on YouTube

It is now two weeks until AMD’s high end graphics card launch and Nvidia is ramping up its own forthcoming graphics releases. Thanks to hardware industry leaks we know that Nvidia is readying the GeForce GTX 580 for launch, and now the company has put up a YouTube video demo of an ‘unnamed’ graphics card in the US.

This unnamed card is allegedly the "fastest DX11 GPU on the planet", which is a pretty good indication that it is the GTX 580. It also features a massive vapour chamber cooler, which is an evolution of the heat pipes historically used on video card heatsinks (AMD also uses a vapour chamber design for a few of its reference models).

This enables Nvidia to eliminate two of the primary issues with the GTX 480, heat and noise. The new chip will still require an obscene amount of power (the GTX 480 has a maximum power draw of 250W), but thanks to the vapour chamber system it won’t sound like your PC is readying for takeoff. In fact, the presentation states that the GTX 580 unnamed card will be quieter than the previous generation GeForce GTX 285.

Considering all the factors, the GTX 580 could well be the card we expected a year ago when Nvidia unveiled the Fermi Architecture. As to being the fastest DX 11 card out there, we have no doubt of the veracity of Nvidia’s claims. Whether or not the mantle of fastest still holds in a few weeks when AMD releases the Radeon HD 6970 and 6990 cards is less clear though.