GeForce GTX 470 and 480, Nvidia's latest graphics cards, were finally launched last Friday, at the Penny Arcade Expo East in Boston, after months of delays and expectation.

Drew Henry, General Manager of Nvidia's GeForce business, told an audience full of hardcore gamers and PC enthusiasts, "We chose to do something new and different and exciting because we wanted you guys to have a great experience with a lot of the next generation games that people are building".

The GTX 480 has a 700 MHz graphics clock speed, 1.5 GB of onboard GDDR5 memory, and 480 shader processors.

According to Henry, the new graphics card would be double the performance of Nvidia's earlier generation GeForce GTX 285 GPU.

The new card also has a processor clock speed of 1.4 MHz and a memory clock speed of 1.8 MHz, with full DirectX 11 support as well as Nvidia's 3D Vision Surround capability.

Several new PC games were shown, such as Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Metro 2033, running on the GTX 480 in 3D mode.

Henry believes that the PC can lead the entire (3D) industry.

He also told the audience that the GTX 480 boasts a huge 3 billion transistors, which was almost equivalent to four Intel Core i7 processors.

The GTX 480 and its slightly lower-powered "little brother" GTX 470 is said to go on sale in about 14 days.

The GTX 480 will come with a price tag of $499, while the GTX 470 will cost $349.