Despite disagreements on heating, Reeves and Nvidia agreed that GTX 480 will bring the best gaming and multimedia experience to PCs of any card on the market. The native support for DirectX 11 tools should provide for realistic images and sound when playing games or watching movies. DirectX 11 includes a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) to improve multimedia on Windows 7 systems.

Nvidia also said parallel programming tools will allow breaking up of tasks over existing CPUs and GPUs to improve graphics and application performance. The Fermi chips will be compatible with Nvidia's CUDA development environment, which helps developers write parallel code.

In September, Nvidia showed off a Fermi chip with 3 billion transistors and 512 processor cores. Though the GTX 480 does not include as many cores, the Fermi architecture is capable of supporting up to 512 cores, said Hector Marinez, an Nvidia spokesman.

"For GeForce GTX 480, we decided to [put] 480 cores in order to support the broadest availability at time of initial launch," Marinez said. More graphics cards for desktops and laptops based on the Fermi models will be released later this year, Marinez said.

The GTX 480 is priced at US$499, while the GTX 470 is priced at $349. The cards will become available in April.