After many months of waiting, attributed further by the fact that the launch date has been pushed back multiple times, FERMI makes its debut today, finally.

In recent weeks we've learnt a lot about what to expect from this very significant release, bar what we want to know the most, performance numbers. Today the cat's right out of the bag for all to see.

I'd be surprised if anyone reading this doesn't already know that the two cards launched today are the GTX 470 and GTX 480; NVIDIA's first generation of DirectX 11 graphics cards. Our VGA specialist Shane Baxtor has been glued to his desk all week gathering up all that there is to know about the cards and shares his findings with all of us in this article that's just gone up in a timely fashion with the NDA lift.

Further to that, we have more performance numbers than you can poke half a dozen graphics cards at now online thanks to his GTX 470 sample he's had in hand to test with throughout the past few days. The card is compared to the current crop of ATI DX11 parts and previous-gen NVIDIA parts, including the use of some new benchmarking apps on top of our existing test regimen.

We were hoping to have a GTX 480 in time for launch as well, but that wasn't to be and we're still waiting on our 480 sample to arrive. Hopefully by mid-next week we can get you those numbers.

Along with the NDA lift comes an enslaught of content slammed up left, right and centre around the web which you can get to via the below links :-

- Techarp
- Hardware Canucks (GTX 470)
- Hardware Canucks (GTX 480)
- Techpowerup (GTX 470)
- Techpowerup (GTX 480)
- Ninjalane
- Hartware
- Neoseeker
- PCGamesHardware
- PC Perspective
- Hardware Heaven
- Hot Hardware
- Anandtech
- LegitReviews
- Benchmark Reviews
- Techspot
- InsideHW
- Brightsideofnews

Stay tuned as we'll have another article online within the next 24 hours where Shane focuses on the overclocking capability of the card, squeezing as much as he can out of it before giving it another workout on the Gulftown equipped test bench.