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.