NVIDIA will be quietly beefing up the power of their GTX 260 cards later this month, suspects the website Fudzilla. Currently, the GTX 260 has a GT200 GPU core that has 8 banks of 24 shader processors enabled, leading to 192 shaders. The new GTX 260 is going to have one less bank disabled, so that means it'll have 9 banks of 24 shader processors, which adds up to 216 shaders altogether. 

At this point, it is a bit too early to tell what the new naming scheme may be. Perhaps it is possible that NVIDIA will do what they did with the 9800 GTX -- to better compete with ATI's HD 4850, they added a bit of horsepower to the 9800 GTX, and renamed it the 9800 GTX+. So maybe we will have a GTX 260+ ?  However, the GTX 260 has not been out all that long though, so NVIDIA might be hesitant to rename the new GTX 260's to prevent annoying customers that have already purchased one. GTX 270? Who knows -- NVIDIA's naming schemes have been all over the place during the last six months, making it fairly difficult to anticipate their next name.  

Whatever the new name will be (or whether there will even be a new name at all), the revised GTX 260 will be selling for about $50 more than it is now. If the new GTX 260 sells for $300 or $350, it will compete well against the HD 4870 in both price and performance. If these rumors turn out to be true, it also seems reasonable that NVIDIA would further cut the price of the GTX 280 with the release of the new GTX 260.

As many of you know, the ball is in NVIDIA's court right now. The GTX 260 and GTX 280 came out in June, and where soon after upstaged by the launch of ATI's HD 4850 and HD 4870. While the GTX 280 was much more expensive than the HD 4870, it did out-perform the ATI card in a reasonable number of benchmarks, making it an attractive purchase to some willing to pay top-bucks for the best. The GTX 260 on the other hand, was less attractive, and less competitive -- it was more expensive than the HD 4850 and HD 4870, and in most games, slower than either of those ATI cards.