It's no surprise to learn that Nvidia's working on its GeForce 9 family of graphics chips, but until today we didn't know when the first of them will appear.

Expect to see high-end GeForce 9s out next February, card-maker moles claimed today by way of DigiTimes. The first is codenamed 'D9E', they say, it's fabbed at 65nm - just like the recently released 'G92' GPU - and will support DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, something AMD's latest Radeons already do.

Yes, but DirectX 10.1 won't be released until early next year - or whenever Microsoft delivers Windows Vista Service Pack 1, the much-anticipated major bug-fix for the new OS. In that respect, Nvidia's D9E launch schedule is sound.

Mid-range GeForce 9s will appear in June 2008. They'll be fabbed at 55nm and based on the 'D9P' core, the sources alleged.

Meantime, AMD has apparently knocked $20 off the price of its new ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 GPUs - the latter reviewed here. That takes board down to around $159 and $199, respectively.

Related reviews
• AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics chip
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics chip

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