NVIDIA in a Twitter update has confirmed the names of the first two graphics chips based on its Fermi architecture. The GeForce GTX 470 and 480 should be the first to ship. Details of their performance weren’t given, but the naming scheme positions them as top-end parts for gamers.
Either should be a generational leap over the GTX 275 and 285 and will have many more shader (visual effects) cores as well as new hardware geometry processing and support for newer DirectX 11 (and OpenGL 3) graphics. Fermi is also designed much more to support general-purpose computing tasks such as OpenCL and PhysX.
Most unofficial estimates have the GTX 470 and 480 shipping in March
