GTS450 – nVidia insider confirms KitGuru’s ‘in store’ prediction correct

Everyone at KitGuru has to turn sideways to get through a lab door this morning. Has the building shrunk? No. Have the doorways become narrower? Nope. So what's the deal? Well, we planted another of the famous ‘Flags of our Predictions' a while back and, guess what, we seem to have nailed it!  Man, our heads are SOOOOO big this morning (ooh er missus).

nVidia struggled to get the first Fermi cards out. However, with Jen Hsun and the rest of the board whipping the engineering team all day and all of the night, productivity finally began in increase.

Slowly, but surely, smiles spread across the pale, sun-denied faces of the nVidia faithful who had been waiting since October 2006 for the dawn of a new generation of visual computing experience. However, the early efforts were seriously pricey. The GTX480 may well have been fastest and most complex GPU ever created, but at over £500 it was outside the reach of mere -mortal-wallets.  The GTX470 and GTX465 went some way to addressing that, but were still stratospheric – compared to the average spend on graphics cards (which is a lot closer to £100/$150).

Jay Puri, nVidia's Executive Vice President for Worldwide Sales has spent a lot of time analysing the market, looking at the movement between nVidia and AMD graphics products, and constantly checking with the engineering teams to see when the rest of the Fermi product range might be ready for deployment. This is important stuff. nVidia needs to compete across the board.

Something that definitely put a smile on Jay's face was the news that nVidia's GTX460, the first card that promised Fermi for the masses, was finally ready to ship. But, even with all of the price drops, it is still around £150. A further price drop was needed for the market to really pick up and for Jay to do his ‘happy jig'.

At the same time, Jen Hsun looked at his share price, considered the words he wanted to use at the Q2 quarterly briefing and began lashing his scientists harder and harder. With Yahoo reporting that nVidia's share price had dropped from $18.50 at the start of the year to $8.94 at the time of writing – almost 50% of the company's value had disappeared. “Not good enough” said Jen Hsun.

Finally, his engineering team are responding.

Cue GTS450.

Here's the graphic we laid down several weeks ago – and we've had it confirmed that we're right.

Available in 2 distinct variations, the more expensive of the two will have a 192-bit memory interface, but the cheaper of the two will use just 128-bits to access some (unspecified amount of) GDDR5 memory.

Having competitively priced parts heading into Q3/4 will be massively important for nVidia.

The news that nVidia can finally compete in the ‘affordable DX11' segment, along with the 50% drop in share price, has meant that almost half of the analysts quoted by Yahoo are seeing light at the end of the tunnel and upgrading their assessment of Jen Hsun's stock.

KitGuru says: We would have posted this story earlier, but our heads are just so big we couldn't get into the KitGuru Lab area to start writing. The swelling has now gone down a bit, so here we are. KITGURU SAID GTS450 WOULD BE IN STORE FOR 14th SEPTEMBER AND INSIDERS HAVE CONFIRMED WE ARE CORRECT. Check back later for some price predictions.

Quick chat below, full verbal intercourse over in the KitGuru Forums.

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