Earlier today, NVIDIA announced the official launch of its new graphics cards GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260. Over the last few days the web has been showered with pre-NDA benchmarks, both single, 2-way and 3-way SLI, which have already given the curious searchers a good picture of what the card could do. Now that the card have been launched a plethora of reviews have been published and we now have an even better overview of what the card can do. The specifications were leaked long ago and have later been confirmed by NVIDIA slides, and of course the reviews posted today.
The full version of G200, because that’s the real name of the core, not GT200, sports 240 shaders, 32 ROPs, 80 texture units and an updated PureVideo. For a brief and easy to understand explanation of the architectural changes we recommend page 2 of techpowerup’s review.
Picture courtesy of BenchmarkReviews
Since G200 is based on the unified architecture that began with the G80 chip, the technical innovations in terms of the hardware may not be as astonishing as what we’re used to with new architectures, but there are other innovations that certainly makes the new GTX series stand out, and it all comes down to CUDA. As you’re most likely aware, CUDA is far from new, but it is extended with G200. HardwareCanucks has a pretty good summation of what these extensions are, e.g. Folding@Home and PhysX.
The rumor of a price cut was true as the GeForce GTX 260 now has a MSRP of $399, while the faster GeForce GTX 280 still costs $649. What you have to ask yourself is not so much if you can afford the card, but if you will really be able to take advantage of it. The true potential of the card first appears when the resolution goes up real high and it is assisted by a powerful CPU. This becomes even more obvious with SLI setups which can be severely limited by the frequency of the CPU.
If you’re one of the many gamers that are stuck at top 1280×1024 this card is not for you. If you do have a monitor that can run 1920×1200 and/or above, and don’t have a GeForce 9800GX2 or 8800/9800 SLI setup, this might be a nice upgrade. The reviews namely show that while it is the most powerful single-GPU card graphics card out there, GeForce 9800GX2 keeps up pretty well.
You might also want to keep in mind that ATI has some cards coming too. This is the last paragraph of TweakTown’s review;
“The other thing I have to say before I wrap this all up is that I’ve tested the HD 4850, and I’ve tested it in Crossfire. Now, if I hadn’t tested those cards I may have been more impressed with the GTX 280, but I have. I’ve seen the performance figures the cards put out. We also know the price on a pair of HD 4850s is going to be under $600 AUD, while the new GTX 280 in stock form seems to be launching at the absolute cheapest in Australia in the low $700 AUD area. Ouch.”
Below are some of the reviews we’ve found so far;
:: Anandtech :: BenchmarkReviews :: Bjorn3D :: DriverHeaven :: EliteBastards :: FiringSquad :: Guru3D :: ExtremeTech :: HardOCP :: HardwareCanucks :: HardwareSecrets :: HardwareZone :: Hexus :: HotHardware :: LegitReviews :: Neoseeker :: NVNews :: Overclock3D :: PCPerspective :: TechPowerUp :: TechReport :: TweakTown :: Tomshardware ::