For many, it felt like Nvidia took forever to launch their GeForce GTX 480 Fermi cards, with 3.2 Billion transistors and 512 CUDA cores (480 exposed). And while the launch was great and the performance was excellent, many expected a bit more from the 480. Several early buyers were quite dissapointed with the 480's power consumption, temperatures, and noise. 7 months after the GeForce GTX 480 was launched, Nvidia is releasing their new flagship GPU, and the successor to the GTX 480: the GeForce GTX 580.When the GeForce GTX 480 launched, it was aimed to excel at  tessellation. With 15 PolyMorph engines, the GTX 480 was able to outperfom ATI's single-GPU flagship card, the HD5870 in tessellation-demanding applications due to the 5870's single dedicated unit for tessellation. The GeForce GTX 580 has a total of 16 PolyMorph Engines, as compared to the 480's 15. This allows for higher performance in games and applications that have high geometry processing and tessellation.