Some more information has come out of Taiwan on the two big upcoming video cards from NVIDIA and ATI, and even Steve Ballmer would be excited about the news.

First off, looks like NVIDIA faked everybody out with the '9900 GTX' name for its upcoming GT200. It turns out that the GT200 is going to a bigger leap in GPU design then some suspected -- the GT200's release is going to usher in the second generation of the unified shader architecture. Because NVIDIA reached the end of the current naming series, and does not want to call the product the 9900 GTX because they are starting something different, the GT200 needed an entirely new name.

So it begins: it looks like the GT200 -- the next flagship card of their new series -- will be called the GeForce GTX 200 series. That's right. They are moving the decimal point to the left this time around. It looks like the '8800 GTX / 9900 GTX' of the newest series is going to be called the GeForce GTX 280. Besides losing the extra digit, it looks like the new number system will be similarly aligned as previous models. So, for example, the low-end card will be the GeForce GTX 230 and the mid-range card will be the GeForce GTX 260. It is also possible that the cards might be labeled the opposite way -- as in the number first, than the model acronym second ("GeForce 280 GTX.")

It looks like two models -- the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 -- will be the first out of the gates.

As for ATI GPU news, they haven't changed their naming code -- it looks very, very likely that they will be releasing the HD 4850 and HD 4870 next month. The HD 4850 will come out first (one source cites June 23rd as the date) and the HD 4870 will come soon after, but it'll be a soft launch, and they probably won't end up in stores until early July.

It looks like the HD 4850 will have GDDR3 memory, and the HD 4870 will have GDDR5. The HD 4870 is also said to rival the speed of the current ATI top-dog, the dual-GPU HD3870X2.

The price? Hong Kong hardware watcher HKEPC says that the HD 4850 will be selling for $229, and the HD 4870 will go for $349 (US bucks.)

We'll have reviews of these fine products as they become available...but remember, until then, all this info is not written in stone.