When NVIDIA launched Fermi, it was clear that the company was taking a dramatic step away from classic GPU design. Fermi was made to crunch numbers and run code more than it was designed to run games. Sure, it can do both, but the results that we saw were that the chip needed much more power and produced more heat than the competition to do the same number of FPS. This changed when we asked the card to work harder by introducing tessellation to the mix, but on current games, the Radeons were a more efficient hardware platform.

The GTX 460 is being billed as "DirectX 11 done right" and I have to believe NVIDIA's marketing here. Simply put, the GF104 chip at the heart of this card is more like what we should have seen to begin with. The designers have trimmed the general-purpose GPU stuff from Fermi without sacrificing tessellation performance and have created a beast of a card that is designed for today's games. With overclocked performance coming near to the top cards on the market today, this is the value of all values in graphics.

While the GTX 470 and GTX 480 still have a very valuable place in our line-up, this new GTX 460 is probably the best bet for most gamers. If you haven't gotten on the DX11 bandwagon yet, this is the card for you. The 470 and 480 are here for those of us who want the best performance possible, and also for those of us that see games becoming more focused on tessellation performance.

I'll try to follow up more with personal musings about this wonder card, but for now, just know that the GTX 460 is an awesome value, and most interestingly, it's ready to go right now. Nordic PC systems will be shipping with it very soon.