NVIDIA has revealed that its first consumer graphics cards to use the long-awaited Fermi architecture - codenamed GF100 - will be productised as the GeForce GTX 470 and GeForce GTX 480.
Knowing that the cards - or, presumably, the GeForce GTX 480 at least - are likely to usurp AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5000-series as the fastest single-GPU solution around, it may come as no surprise to notice NVIDIA has taken a giant leap in terms of model numbers.
The company's current cream-of-the-crop remains the GeForce GTX 295 - and, along with the GeForce GTX 285, GTX 275 and others, it'll soon be superseded by GeForce 400 series products.
Why the giant leap, and whatever happened to the GeForce 300 series? Cast your memory back to the tail end of 2009 and you'll recall that the GeForce 300 series did make a somewhat lacklustre appearance - arriving as little other than rebranded 200-series GPUs.
We tend to struggle in making sense of NVIDIA's nomenclature - and AMD's for that matter - but that's no reason to try. Could it be that NVIDIA is trying to align its DX10, DX10.1 and DX11 parts under the GeForce 200, 300 and 400 series brands, respectively?
It's possible, or it could be that NVIDIA is suggesting that the upcoming 400-series products will offer double the performance of the 200-series range. We like the sound of that.
