One of the most expected products in hardware industry these days is NVIDIA' GeForce GTX 280. NVIDIA says that it's a new generation product, which is not just a simple upgrade from the G92 chip. It is still based on the same technology but it has some major upgrades that make it worthy of calling it the next-gen graphics card. In past two years we were witnesses of great improvements in graphics card segment, when we got G70 and R520 card which evolved later in G71 and R580. Both ATI and NVIDIA after the release of the new gen products, released practically the same chips with some new features but most important is that those chips were made in a smaller production process. - InsideHW

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 Graphics Edition Review

The GeForce GTX 280card finds its roots in the G80 chip, and similar to it in a few ways. The most significant similarity of those chips, including the G92, is that they work on same principle and that is parallel computing, where every single shader processor can become a single core in a 240 core system, making use for CUDA technology for example. There are lots of new features that this GPU introduces for the first time. It has 1.4 billion transistors and is quite huge, and there we have the first similarity with the G80 GPU really. When G80 came out, everybody was impressed with its huge size, so it is with the GT200 chip.

The reason why this GPU is so big is because NVIDIA used old 65nm production process, which resulted in huge GPU size, and also made it impossible to integrate NVIO chip into the GeForce GTX 280. The NVIO chip is yet again out of the GPU, and finds itself in front part of the board. When this fact came to public, a majority of media and users expressed negative critique because, by their opinion that wasn't the smartest thing to do and by doing that NVIDIA makes a huge mistake. Production process in 65nm is the safest route for NVIDIA and they are using this process since they want to have as small yield as possible.

First of all, it has 240 shader processors. That's almost doubled amount than the G92 had. Of course that is not all. The number of texture units is also increased to a number of 80, and so is the situation with raster operation units which can be numbered at 32 in total. There is 1GB of memory which is supported by a 512-bit memory bus. Other than the improvements regarding numbers, there are a lot of new features that are exclusive to the GeForce GTX 280 architecture that can make it a great gaming tool. One thing that NVIDIA is proud of is a new feature for their cards, namely PhysX technology support.

When it comes to performance NVIDIA is once again the king of the hill. Every game we tried was playable even at largest resolutions with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Everything except of course, Crysis which couldn't run perfectly smooth on maximum resolution with these features enabled. But every other game isn't a problem for the GeForce GTX 280. The final verdict for this card is simple. It's new, it's no doubt the best single GPU card today, and it will satisfy even the most hardcore gamers for whom this card is intended for. And if you want the second best just go for the GeForce GTX 260 version.

If you want the best graphics card right now, and you have enough money you should go and buy the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280. If you are one of those who will find this product to expensive and won't buy it just because of that rest assured that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 is geat product. Of course you can always wait for the die shrink version of the GeForce GTX 280 that will be produced in smaller production process, with less power consumption and lower price.