It is fair to say that 2008 hasn't been the best of years for NVIDIA, between their faulty GPU dramas and, perhaps more importantly AMD snatching the initiative from them in the graphics market, catching them cold with a change of strategy that has paid dividends for much of the year since the launch of the Radeon HD 4800 series. However, NVIDIA really have never been a company to take such setbacks lying down, and these recent months in particular have seen the GPU manufacturer fighting back on several fronts. Perhaps one of the more notable changes to bring them back into the competition was the introduction of a new revision to their GeForce GTX 260 part, dubbed the Core 216. - Elite Bastards

XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Graphics Edition Review

Starting out with the basics, the GT200 core is manufactured using the tried and trusted 65nm process, the same as that used for the G92 chipset. This does however, make it ripe for a 55nm die shrink at some unspecified point in the future, just as the 90nm G80 was shrunk into what became the 65nm G92 core. In total, there are 240 scalar thread processors within a full GT200 core, a large jump over the 128 shader units available to both G80 and G92 chips. These thread processors are arranged into processing arrays, each of which contains eight shaders coupled with a small amount of local memory to handle data.

In a move to substantially increase the memory bandwidth available to the GPU, a full GT200 core also features a 512-bit memory interface. The boards 1GB of GDDR3 memory, in case of the GeForce GTX 280 is paired up into eight sets of two 32-bit paths to communicate with the GPU itself, giving us that 512-bit bus width overall. The GeForce GTX 260 card features a reduced version of this core. While the original GeForce GTX 260 configuration had two processing clusters and one raster operation partition disabled to give it only 192 shaders, this has since been overhauled into what is known as the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216.

As we just mentioned, while the GeForce GTX 260 Black edition may look like a standard reference board in terms of its cooling solution, things begin to look very different once you take a look at clock speeds, with this part offering some big boosts to clocks across the board. Starting out with the Black edition's core clock, the reference clock speed of 576MHz is ditched in favour of a 666MHz clock. Together with this, the shader clock speed also gets a big increase up to 1404MHz. Lastly, the board's GDDR3 memory gets an impressive increase up to 2300MHz effective. All that will lead to greater gaming performance.

If there's one thing that anyone who has been following the 3D graphics industry will have learned over the years, it's never write off NVIDIA. Earlier this year, it was hard to see how the graphics giant would be able to turn things around in the short term, being beaten out at various price and performance thresholds and with little left to make a comeback. Thanks to a three pronged approach that involved some hefty price cuts, the introduction of the new GeForce GTX 260 revision we've seen on show today with 216 stream processors available to it, and new drivers with some impressive performance improvements to boot.

This triumvirate of changes has now pushed the reference clocked GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 to the point where it can breathe down the neck of the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, giving it a run for its money and even beating it out quite frequently, all at a similar price point. Of course, it still lacks a full DirectX 10.1 implementation, but then again PhysX raises its head in an attempt to being people back on board the good ship NVIDIA. Of course, you can always rely on XFX to look at NVIDIA's reference clocks, scrap those clock speeds and go with something much, much faster while still employing the reference cooling solution.

This is exactly what's happened with the GeForce GTX 260 Black edition, which employs some decent clock speed increases to both core and memory to put it some way above both a reference GeForce GTX 260 and AMD's Radeon HD 4870 1GB. Of course, these improvements don't come for free, with the increase in retail price putting the board above the average GeForce GTX 260, but if you're looking for as much performance as you can muster without going all the way up to the GeForce GTX 280, then XFX's Black edition part has it in spades. Put simply, it's a cut above reference GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 parts.