Beyond Gaming - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB GDDR3

Conclusion

Conclusion

From a technical point of view, the architecture on the new GTX 200 GPUs is not significantly different from the original GeForce 8800 GTX. Considering that the GeForce 8800 GTX represented a major shift from distinct pixel and shaders to unified shaders, it would be quite unfair to judge the GTX 200 on that basis. Perhaps in the near future, we may see another new architecture (ray tracing hybrid maybe?) but for the moment, the GTX 200 adds even more hardware, while having quite a few internal tweaks to gear it for modern games with their increasingly complex shaders.

With its stream processors increased to 240, the GeForce GTX 280 is the new flagship GPU from NVIDIA and the largest. From that alone, one can expect a performance boost, all things being equal. Of course, NVIDIA did have other enhancements to improve it further, including an extensive list of optimizations, like an increased output buffer, larger registers, increased memory bandwidth to 512-bit wide, a 1GB frame buffer size, double precision floating-point support and so on. Some of these are not easily reflected in raw performance, though it could make the GTX 280 more useful in general computing.

This seems to be NVIDIA's focus in recent times, with the company emphasizing on the growing importance of its GPUs in these parallel computing tasks. Like the GeForce 8/9 series, the new GTX 280 are CUDA capable and NVIDIA's purchase of Ageia also means that PhysX will be ported over to take advantage of these GPUs in physics processing. In short, besides its graphics prowess, getting a modern NVIDIA GPU will have such additional benefits and features and you will definitely see such capabilities on the GTX 200.

When it comes to gaming performance, the GeForce GTX 280 easily justified its billing and improved over the former single GPU champion from NVIDIA, the GeForce 9800 GTX. However, when it came to some of the newer dual-GPU single-card comparisons, the newcomer has some ground to make up. Depending on the games and settings, the GeForce 9800 GX2 could be more than a match for the GTX 280 and similarly, would the Radeon HD 3870 X2 (the latter being much more 'affordable' and thus easily a consideration for many). The power management improvements alone however can be quite significant over the previous high-end GPUs and Hybrid SLI is also possible for the least power draw.

We had a peek at NVIDIA's presentation slides for the GTX 200 and in the new world order, there was no place for the GeForce 9800 GX2 at the top. It does seem likely that the GeForce 9800 GX2 will suffer the same fate as the previous GX2, replaced by a newer card. For all this, NVIDIA is asking quite the premium for its new high-end flagship, with the GTX 280 priced at a whopping US$649 at launch, far beyond any existing high-end GPUs now. By contrast, the GTX 260 will be available for US$399, which once you consider the likely performance delta between the two, looks like much better value. If getting the best is your main prerogative then the GTX 280 is exactly that, but you'll have to pay dearly for it. The key to really take advantage of the GTX 280 is cutting edge games at extreme quality settings as well as GP-GPU computing tasks, so keep these in mind and you won't be disappointed. For all other purposes and needs, the GTX 280 would easily be an overkill.

Stay tuned as we will shortly bring you a review of the GTX 260 as well for your full consideration of the new series.