In now knowing when NVIDIA plans to unveil its GTX 400 Series (based on Fermi/GF100), which happens to be at PAX 2010 next month (March 26 to be exact), information is beginning to trickle out as to the underlying specs on the GTX 470 and 480 cards, in turn helping give a better perspective on the performance expectations of the models.

NVIDIAs next-gen GF100 silicon physically has 512 CUDA cores, 16 geometry units, 64 TMUs, 48 ROPs and a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface. GTX 480 will of course be without limits and make use of every bit of this power in all regards. GTX 470 is of course a cut-down lower priced variant, but we're not yet sure in which areas and by how much NVIDIA will restrict it.

DonanimHaber gets a hint by sources that the GTX 470 may be limited to 448 or possibly 480 CUDA cores and have a narrower memory interface, down to maybe 320-bit. Clock speeds on the core/memory will likely take a bit of a drop as well. This card is said to have a power draw of around 300W and perform somewhere in between the HD 5850 and 5870.

The GTX 480 is being promised to give comparable performance to the current dual-GPU equipped GTX 295, but is of course a single GPU card. A recent store listing for this card popped up for pre-order which indicated pricing at $699 USD.