NVidia's behavior somehow suggests that they're having something to hide ... like e.g. underwhelming performance, overwhelming power consumption, or yield rates so miserable that you will not be able to really purchase such a card for months after the official release date. Did I mention buggy drivers already?

I know nVidia goes ON and ON about how this will be like the second coming of Christ, ad nauseum. The simple fact is that their manufacturing processes at this level have proven to be inferior to ATi's most likely due to the fact that AMD is far more gifted at chip design than nVidia ever was. As a result of this, I don't believe there is any way they can unseat the Radeon HD 5970 simply because ATi has proven that they have superior cooling and power control systems than nVidia and the HD 5970 JUST manages to squeak in under the power ceiling of ATX specification. With those truths in mind, how will Fermi defeat the HD 5970 and still conform to ATX power spec? The short answer of course is that they won't. I don't think ATi has much to be worried about. Look for nVidia to try to arm-twist review websites into using games that nVidia supplies. The only problem this time is that nVidia is no longer in firm control of the graphics market and unless ATi REALLY screws something up, they never will be again.

.... consumption, look at the photo with the 8 and 6 pin power connectors!

So, a little bit of imagination..

~ 200W from the 16x PCI
~ 400W from the 8 Pin
~ 300W from the 6 Pin
_____
900W ~

;D