Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 coming on December 7, one day before AMD Radeon HD 6900 launch

Things are about to get a lot hotter in the desktop graphics cards wars, and I'm not just talking about the heat being generated inside your system.

Nvidia hopes to short-circuit the hoopla over the launch of AMD's new flagship Radeon HD 6900 series of boards, due to be released on December 8, by bringing out the new GeForce GTX 570 the day before.

We know a little bit about the GTX 570's specs thanks to a leak from Nvidia partner Palit found on a Swedish tech site. Compared to its recently released GTX 580 sibling, the new card has fewer CUDA cores (480 vs. 512), less DDR5 memory (1.28GB vs. 1.5GB), and slower clocks speeds. Of course it will cost less, too, but we don't know pricing yet. It should also run a little cooler as well.

It's a bit of a gamble on Nvidia's part to launch next Tuesday, since the GTX 570, along with the GTX 580, will be immediately benchmarked against the Radeon HD 6900 series, and it's possible the green giant's new cards will be outclassed. Then again, maybe Nvidia thinks it has a good reason to preempt things. We'll find out more by the middle of next week, so stay tuned.

[Via Fudzilla]