For more than a month, if not even two, Nvidia has been suffering from an overall shortage of GT200-based products. Partners are complaining and the fact that ATI has just launched the first 40nm DirectX 11 card doesn’t help Nvidia partners at all.

The good thing for Nvidia partners is that ATI is still far from being able to deliver enough cards due to huge demand and this doesn’t look to be solved in the next few weeks. Nvidia is also waiting for a positive market reaction after it spilled the beans of its 'GT300' Fermi-based chip and its possible market dominance. Again, the chip is not out and 5870 and 5850 are the only two DirectX 11 cards on the market. The HD 5870 is faster than any other single chip solution and it also has a future proof stamp with DirectX 11 support.

The GT200 shortage might continue to last and could simply be replaced by the shortage of Fermi, once it launches, as the demand for Fermi is expected to be unlike anything you’ve seen before. Fermi is great, but the demand from both server guys for Tesla computing and gamers due its great performance might be outstanding.

The question remains how many GPUs can Nvidia pump out and can they supply enough on time to satisfy the market.