NVIDIA Unveils GeForce GTX 690 -- Dual Graphics Card Combines World's Fastest Gaming Performance With Sleek, Sexy Design

SHANGHAI -- (Marketwire) -- 04/28/2012 -- GEFORCE LAN/NVIDIA Game Festival 2012 -- NVIDIA today announced the GeForce® GTX 690, the world's fastest consumer graphics card1 -- with a bold industrial design to match.

Powered by dual Kepler™ architecture-based GeForce GPUs, the GTX 690 is meticulously designed -- inside and out -- to deliver the most refined, elegant and smooth PC gaming experience possible.

The surprise announcement was made by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang during his keynote address at the NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai, which is being attended by more than 6,000 gamers from across China.

Now that we're officially in the throes of holiday shopping season, NVIDIA's rolling out a promotion of its own, though sadly it doesn't involve any steep discounts. The outfit just announced a special edition GPU: the GTX 560 Ti with 448 CUDA cores, running at 1.46GHz, a 732MHz graphics clock and 1.25GB of GDDR5 memory charging ahead at an effective rate of 3.8GHz. Other features include support for three-way SLI, DisplayPort, HDMI and DVI. Those specs place it snugly between the current GTX 560 Ti with 384 CUDA cores, and the higher-end GTX 570, which packs 480. If this seems like a puzzling move, it is indeed the first time NVIDIA's bothered with a limited holiday edition card, though in conversations with reporters the company made it clear its new hardware is meant to dovetail with the arrival of games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham City. If you're shopping for a gamer (or, you know, yourself), it's available now for $289 in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany Russia and Nordic countries through companies like ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte, among others.

Update: Looks like the reviews are rolling in! We've linked a handful of 'em below. HotHardware, Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, PC Perspective, Hexus