Product review: The Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 & 260 (page 16: Conclusion)

Conclusion

With the launch of the GeForce GTX 200, Nvidia reaffirms its leadership in the high end and its intention of continuing to produce large GPUs. The GT200 found in these cards integrates no less than 1.4 billion transistors.

By slightly touching up GeForce 8 architecture in order to improve all of the small problematic details or others that could soon become a limitation, Nvidia can now replace the GeForce 9800 GX2 with a card equipped with a single chip: the GeForce GTX 280. Of course in some cases it is surpassed by the previous high end, but in others, it is ahead with better consistency because it does not suffer from the weaknesses of the multi-GPU system.

It also benefits from increased local memory which finally attains 1 GB. This is useful in certain complex situation which should become more and more common. For a price of 550€, this card is without rival and therefore ought to find its place in the machines of extreme performance fanatics. In turn, they can be combined in SLI or triple SLI for the more well-off.

Its smaller sibling, the Geforce GTX 260 is a notch below in terms of performances, but it is still ahead of the GeForce 9800 GTX. Its price fixed at 309€ is particularly attractive and is just a taste of the competition to come with the Radeon HD 4870.

You may have gathered that while the GT200 found in these cards is late, the base architecture is the same, increasing performances by 50% in almost 2 years is nothing extraordinary and Nvidia remaining intent on ignoring DirectX 10.1 is annoying, we still find this GPU attractive. Indeed, it seems well balanced and ready for the future that should be an exciting one in the realm of graphic cards. As proof of this, there is the arrival of softwares that are capable of benefiting from CUDA such as Badaboom, to encode video and Folding@Home as well as the PhysX API in its GPU version.