NVIDIA Announces GTX 260 and GTX 280 Graphic Cards

If there is one thing NVIDIA does well, it’s the art of taking one GPU core and prolonging it’s lifespan as much as possible. When G80 was first launched, in the form of the 8800 GTX, it offered mind-blowing performance that obliterated the competition. Amazingly, though, it kept that way for quite a while, as the 8800 GTX was the leading GPU all the way up until ATI released their HD 3870 X2.

But then we had the 9-series, and dual-GPU solutions. Of course, it’s not surprising to see a dual-GPU solution out-perform a single GPU, but today, NVIDIA unveils their GTX 280, which accomplishes just that. Compared to the 9800 GX2, it wins in many competitions and follows just inches behind in others. For a single-GPU solution, that’s impressive… as heck.

The downside is that the new GTX 280 is expensive, but that’s to be expected for a brand-new offering that happens to blow away every other single-GPU solution before it. At $649 each, SLI might be out of the question for early adopters, but for the hardcore (and I do mean hardcore) enthusiasts, 3-way SLI is definitely possible.

In the end, the new GPU consumes less power than the 9800 GX2, is quieter, runs just as warm, and happens to perform like the true beast we expected it to. Hard to not like that. We didn’t receive our samples in sufficient time, so we were unable to publish our content today, but stay tuned as it should be delivered before the end of the week.

Now we just need to await ATI’s upcoming offerings to see where everything will fall into place.

Though producing such a massive GPU, does have its drawbacks, which are evident when you consider its die size and when looking at power consumption characteristics, the fact remains NVIDIA has produced the most powerful and fastest graphics card we have ever tested – yet again.

Source: HotHardware