Visuals stemming from Nvidia's Fermi may make you do a double-take.

Memorex used to have a very catchy slogan: is it live, or is it Memorex? That very slogan came to mind when viewing a few outlandishly realistic renders here on a Chinese forum. Thanks to Nvidia's Fermi hardware, virtual realism has taken a huge step towards mimicking reality to the point of asking: is it real, or is it a render? A "dramatic upgrade" doesn't justify the visual leap Nvidia has made in virtually recreating faces and environments.

Fermi, the company's next-generation CUDA architecture, is jammed pack with more than 30 million transistors and a maximum of 512 CUDA cores "enabling supercomputer performance," as the forum post states. If the leaked images are indeed genuine--showing fantastic ray tracing goodness, facial hair, and even defined skin pores (sans zits)--then gamers have a lot to look forward to when Nvidia launches the GeForce 300 series... possibly by the end of the year.

Electronista points out that a second set of forum users have noted that Nvidia confirmed the launch of notebook versions of Fermi. While the supposed release date is a vague "near future," it's estimated that the chipsets will be aimed at the mid-to-low end laptops. The GTS 360M will serve as the company's mobile performance chip, and the GT 225M and GT 330M will be geared towards mainstream models. Low-end systems will likely integrate the GeForce 310M and 305M GPUs.