GeForce GTX 280 And GTX 260 Officially Launched

NVIDIA finally introduced its new family of GeForce GTX 200 graphics processors (GPUs)-which includes the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 GPUs.




By recognizing that the value of a GPU transcends gaming, an increasing number of applications are also being written that use the GPU for straight, non-graphical computational tasks. For example, Stanford University's distributed computing computational program Folding@Home, combines the computing horsepower of millions of consumer GPUs to simulate protein folding to help find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. With the computing processing power of the GeForce GTX family, applications such as Folding@Home and others can run upwards of 140 times faster on an NVIDIA general-purpose parallel processor than on some of today's traditional CPUs.

"GeForce GPUs will soon deliver the biggest boost in processing power we've seen in the history of Folding@Home," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University. "The GeForce GTX 280 GPU runs Folding@Home 45 times faster than the latest 3GHz Core2 Quad CPU. If just one percent of the world's GeForce 8- and 9-Series GPUs ran Folding@Home, we would have 70 petaflops of processing power to help find cures for disease. That's 10 times more processing power than the world's top 100 supercomputers combined."

The CUDA general-purpose parallel processing mode will usher in a new generation of ultra realistic games. Developers can use the supercomputing power of the CUDA Computing mode to simulate realistic, physically accurate effects then render beautiful images using the GeForce GPU mode. NVIDIA GPUs are also the only ones to support PhysX technology, the world's most pervasive physics engine that is already delivering dynamic 3D realism to more than 140 games across multiple platforms, and is being used by more than 25,000 developers worldwide. With PhysX, developers can incorporate effects such as rigid body dynamics, collision detection, and cloth simulation that dramatically change the way the games are played and how the on-screen stories unfold, and then accelerate those effects using the processing power of the GPU.

"I haven't been this excited about a new gaming technology in years," said Chris Taylor, CEO and founder of Gas Powered Games. "We're focusing all of our physics efforts on PhysX, and it already delivers the kinds of advanced effects in Space Siege that takes the whole experience to the next level. And in the near-future, you're going to see real-time, Hollywood cinematic-level environmental effects on GPUs like the GeForce GTX 280. We're talking about some wicked-cool technology here!"

* 2nd Generation NVIDIA Unified Architecture: Delivers 50% more gaming performance over the Company's previous NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU through 240 enhanced processor cores that provide incredible shading horsepower at resolutions as high as 2560 x 1600.
* 3-way NVIDIA SLI Technology: Industry leading 3-way NVIDIA SLI technology offers amazing performance scaling by implementing 3-way alternate frame rendering (AFR) for the world's fastest gaming solution under Windows Vista.
* NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology: The combination of HD video decode acceleration and post-processing delivers unprecedented picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for movies and video.
* NVIDIA CUDA Technology: With the power of NVIDIA CUDA technology and the new CUDA runtime for Windows Vista, programmers can now offload the most intensive processing tasks from the CPU to the NVIDIA GPUs, putting the power of up to 240 multi-threaded processor cores to work.v


Add new comment



GeForce GTX 280 And GTX 260 Officially Launched

I've used both nVidia and ATi cards many times and if you can't get over your asinine fanboyism enough to see the forest for the trees then its your loss.ATi has had their asses routinely handed to them the last two years, and all the AMD buyout has done for ATi is force them to focus on the "mainstream consumer" which translates into weaker but wider selling cards.The -real world- benchmarks (those things that plague ATi cards) for the G200 chipset are even posted on this same website.Jeeze, if ATi's next card is better, congratulations to them, but currently their best is blah and crossfire is still treading water versus SLi.If you're going to post idiotic fanboy nonsense do it somewhere that the evidence isn't a few mouse clicks away on the same site

GeForce GTX 280 And GTX 260 Officially Launched

The GTX280 is not worth the cash, that's for certain, BUT if you DO have the money to burn you WILL get a good performance boost over the 9*** generation of nVidia cards. This series is in fact a large step forward. The GTX 280 has a 512 bit memory bus with 1gb of GDDR3 RAM, the 260 has a 448 bit memory bus with 896MB GDDR3 RAM. The memory frequency of these cards is ludicrous. The 280 is the only card capable of running Crysis at 1920*1200 with 16XAF and No AA. This is with everything except for Objects Quality set to "High". That's impressive as hell.The 260 is definitely the best bang for your buck. The 260 performs better then the 9800GTX in SLI mode. So the $399 price tag is a huge win for the performance you're getting.If you have ANY single GPU setup, it is totally worth the $399 for the upgrade.

Add new comment