Nvidia today finally introduced its new family of GeForce GTX 200 graphics processors (GPUs) - which includes the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 GPUs, promising to take graphics beyond gaming and gaming beyond anything that's ever been possible before on a consumer computing platform.
Nvidia claims that the architecture of the new GPU offers twice the power GeForce 8800 GTX, improves power efficiency and provide enhanced CUDA performance. With CUDA technology and the new CUDA runtime for Windows Vista, programmers can offload the most intensive processing tasks from the CPU to the Nvidia GPUs, putting the power of up to 240 multi-threaded processor cores to work.
The company also talks about teraflops of computational power from the GTX 200 line, enhanced graphics powered by PhysX and suppport for 3-way SLI.
The GTX 280 is built on a 65nm process and has 1.4 billion transistors. The cards have a native graphics clock of 602MHz, processor clock of 1,296 MHz, and a memory clock of 2,214 MHz. The GTX 280 has 1GB of GDDR3 and 240 processing cores and 32 ROPs.
The GTX 260 is also built on the 65 nm process and has 1.4 billion transistors. The graphics clock for the GTX 260 is 576 MHz, the processor clock is 1,242 MHz, and the memory clock is 1,998 MHz. The memory interface on the GTX 260 is 448-bit and it has 896MB of GDDR3 memory. The GTX 260 has 192 processing cores and 28 ROPs. The maximum board power is 182W.
Below you can see a comparison among Nvidia's latest video cards.
| |
GTX
280 |
GTX
260 |
9800
GX2 |
9800
GTX |
8800
GTS 512 |
8800
GT |
| Stream Processors |
240 |
192 |
256 |
128 |
128 |
112 |
| Texture Address /
Filtering |
80 / 80 |
64 / 64 |
128 / 128 |
64 / 64 |
56 / 56 |
56 / 56 |
| ROPs |
32 |
28 |
32 |
16 |
16 |
16 |
| Core Clock |
602MHz |
576MHz |
600MHz |
675MHz |
650MHz |
600MHz |
| Shader Clock |
1296MHz |
1242MHz |
1500MHz |
1690MHz |
1625MHz |
1500MHz |
| Memory Clock |
1107MHz |
999MHz |
1000MHz |
1100MHz |
970MHz |
900MHz |
| Memory Bus Width |
512-bit |
448-bit |
256-bit x 2 |
256-bit |
256-bit |
256-bit |
| Frame Buffer |
1GB |
896MB |
1GB |
512MB |
512MB |
512MB |
| Number of Transistors |
1.4B |
1.4B |
1.5B |
754M |
754M |
754M |
| Manufacturing Process |
TSMC 65nm |
TSMC 65nm |
TSMC 65nm |
TSMC 65nm |
TSMC 65nm |
TSMC 65nm |
Graphics cards featuring GeForce GTX 280 GPUs will be available starting today from add-in card manufacturers. Graphics cards featuring GeForce GTX 260 GPUs will be available starting on Thursday, June 26, 2008. Suggested retail pricing for the GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 GPUs are $649 and $399, respectively.