Last week we had a peek at the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 (http://www.gadgetaddiction.com/gaming/mobility-radeon/) so it’s only fitting that this week that the spotlight shifts to Nvidia. Yesterday the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 debuted, kicking-off a new, next-gen line of GPUs. The specs themselves are quite stellar, so make sure that if you’re a technophile without cash to spare that you stop reading here, because rest assured, power has its price.
The GTX 280 packs 1GB of RAM in cahoots with 240 processing cores, while the 260 has 896MB and 192 cores. $650 and $399 are the respective prices. But, consider that this new line is going against the previous generation, which gravitated towards 2-in-1 cards in order to generate its horsepower. Thus, the GTX 200-line of cards packs more firepower into a single, efficient package. This translates into better performance with a 40 percent cheaper price tag.
As with any new line for graphics cards, the battles aren’t fought in some Tron like setting (although…) but in benchmark scores. The initial word from Nvidia looked something like this:
As you can see, the puny bars clearly belong to some lesser company that happens to be in competition with Nvidia. Fools! Can they not see the towering hulks of performance that is the GTX 200 series?! Diminutive challenger, you’d best be packing your bags!
However, several intrepid graphics junkies have conducted their own benchmarks and found the numbers weren’t so clear cut. In fact the GeForce 9800 GX2 out performed both the 260 and 280 in a Crysis maxed-out-detail benchmark test. However, that being said, proper driver optimization hasn’t been conducted for these brand-spanking new cards and a GeForce 9800 GX2 could still run you as much as $600.
One of those intrepid junkies works for Tom’s Hardware and they’ve put together a comprehensive overview, review, buyers-guide, and how-to (yea, it’s so huge that the link and description needs to span several words and commas! The review spans 29 pages and includes footage of the bad boys in action. If you’re seriously considering one of these cards, you owe it to your self to spend some time taking in their thoughts).
