Product review: The Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 & 260
by Damien Triolet
Published on July 7, 2008
HD video
We didn’t test HD video encoding performances on these cards because there is nothing new. The GT200 integrates the VP2 which is already found in the latest Nvidia products. You may recall it has complete support of h.264 video encoding but only partial support of VC-1 format videos.
We should specify that Nvidia has added an HD video profile to its energy savings system. The GPU therefore does not run at full speed when reading HD videos and limits itself to the required minimum in order to reduce consumption and guarantee the necessary performances.
For this test, Nvidia provided us with a beta version of Badaboom, a video conversion tool, which uses the GPU via CUDA for extremely fast processing. We didn’t include any performance tests based on this program as it is still limited to its current beta version. On the other hand, there is no doubt that it is very fast and promising.
Folding@Home
Finally! The Folding@Home GPU client supports Nvidia GPUs Nvidia from the GeForce 8 onward. This support is via CUDA and while the client is not yet made public, it shouldn’t be long. We tested a beta version by comparing the results obtained with the Radeon HD 3870 with its own client and Catalyst 8.3 :
The GeForce has largely superior performances. However, it is difficult to say if this is related to its architecture or CUDA which facilitates the proper use of the GPU. Most likely, it’s a bit of both.
