According to Digitimes, Nvidia's Fermi is still plagued by poor yields, but the company is still expected to have enough cards at launch.TSMC's yields are apparently still under 50 percent and it is unclear whether they can or will improve anytime soon.

However, as we said earlier, Nvidia opted to reduce the number of cores from 512 to 480 on the flagship GTX 480, while the GTX 470 will have even fewer cores, 448 to be exact.

Should TSMC manage to improve the yields, Nvidia could probably launch a faster version with more shaders, putting more pressure on ATI. However, ATI has shipped a few million DirectX 11 cards since October, so this is a small consolation for Nvidia.

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