Drew Henry, the new general manager of Geforce and Ion has told us today that Fermi will be faster than anything available including the shiny new Radeon 5870. Since we learned that the chip should ship in 2009, Nvidia might have a winner on its hands and you should be able to buy one before Xmas.

This is the general idea. We also expect that Fermi will beat the performance of Geforce 295 as well, as this was hinted in many a conversation we had in the last three days. Of course Nvidia did confirm that they are working on the GX2 version of the Fermi and that the TDP for both single and dual card should be similar to numbers we’ve seen with Geforce GTX 285 single and 295 dual card.

Nvidia is confident that in gaming performance they will win versus ATI and since they’ve seen what 5870 is capable of, they are quite confident they'll have an upper hand.