NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280

I want to begin this article by expressing that like many of you reading this article, I spent money on 9800-series GeForce products thinking that my choice would be free of buyers remorse for at least a year. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that the GeForce 8800 series landed itself atop the competition and reigned supreme for well over a year. So it seemed logical that when NVIDIA launched their 9800 series, that things would somehow remain the same. So this is where I break some painful news to owners of premium top-end GeForce products: there's a new king named GTX 280 and he's not just a bigger, better, version of something we've already seen. The new GeForce GTX 280 presents a completely new core design, and introduces NVIDIA's 2nd-generation DirectX 10 architecture as opens up a new dimension of heterogeneous computing.

Hot on the heels of a rapid-succession GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce 9800 GTX launch only two short months ago, NVIDIA now officially unveils the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 video cards. Using the fastest and most-powerful graphics processor NVIDIA has ever developed, both new GeForce products are constructed from a freshly-minted GT200 graphics processor (. Both the GTX 280 and GTX 260 products position themselves at the very highest segment of the GeForce product line. NVIDIA Estimates that the GeForce GTX 280 will be introduced at $649, while the similarly powerful GeForce GTX 260 will enter the $399 price point. If the competition ever had a very good reason to be concerned with their future, it would be right now.



Now would also be a good time to explain why the new GTX 280 and GTX 260 product launch had to occur just nine weeks after the last GeForce 9-series launch. We offer a full explaination in the following section, but the short explanation is that the GT200 GPU isn't just another GPU with a few extra cores and speed increases; this is a whole new creature that does more than just render graphics.

Sure, you can realistically expect phenomenal frame rate results out of this video card, but you can also expect that real-world applications such as Adobe's upcoming CS4 software suite can actually perform every manner of tasks faster with this new GPU than any multi-core CPU ever could (which I witnessed first-hand at the NVIDIA Editors Day 2008 event). Finally, graphical demands of every imaginable level are handled by a GPU that out-paces the ability of a CPU, making it a lot more than just another video card. It's going to be tough to contain my enthusiasm since I've been testing this card for almost two weeks now; but I assure you that while the performance is every bit as real as I say it is.