Today NVIDIA is introducing two new graphics processing units based upon their GeForce GTX 200 series, meaning their long awaited GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 versions. Both these GPU's are high-end products targeted at gaming enthusiasts and will be featured on graphics cards retailing for $649 and $399 respectively. The GeForce GTX 280 is NVIDIA's most complex and powerful GPU to date and contains well over 1.4 billion transistors. Based upon second generation unified architecture, the GeForce GTX 280 card functions as a multi-purpose processor capable of accelerating real-time 3D graphics scenes as well as computationally intensive parallel computing applications. - nV News

EVGA e-GeForce GTX 280 FTW Edition Board Review

With a total of 240 shader processors, 80 texture processors, and 1GB of frame buffer memory, the GeForce GTX 280 will provide unprecedented levels of 3D graphics performance. Since its acquisition of AGEIA, NVIDIA has been porting the PhysX application programming interface over to CUDA. In fact, NVIDIA is in the process of finalizing some driver that will allow the existing 70 million plus GeForce 8 series and up based cards to hardware accelerate PhysX applications via CUDA. By leveraging the CUDA technology, the GeForce GTX 280 card can transform itself into a fully programmable multi-processor with 240 cores.

These GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 both exceed NVIDIA's high-end GeForce 8 series offerings in the amount of memory available and memory bus width. Compared to the 768MB of graphics memory available on the GeForce 8800 GTX, which has withstood the test of time, the GeForce GTX 280 features 1GB of GDDR3 memory while the GeForce 260 is outfitted with 896MB. In addition, they feature a wider memory bus than the GeForce 8800 GTX. The GeForce 8800 GTX has a 384-bit memory bus, while the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 have memory bus widths of 512-bits and 448-bits respectively.

Although we only had a few days to skim the surface of the GeForce GTX 280's capabilities, the EVGA FTW model performed flawlessly during our 3D testing under Windows XP. This model is moderately overclocked out of the box from the reference model. Fan noise is noticeable under load, but not overbearing. The GeForce GTX 280 version outperformed the GeForce 8800 GTX at all the high resolutions. While the increase in performance at these extreme settings will command a premium price, NVIDIA has finally delivered a true successor to the awesome GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card.