GeForce GTX 280 And GTX260 From NVIDIA
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Tuesday, 17 June 2008 00:14 |
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 The new GTX 280 and GTX 260 cards are among the most anticipated releases of this year. By now, we have already gotten familiar with the specs and the details of the cards, and all we have been waiting for was NVIDIA's decision to go official with the new product lineup. Next in line are the new ATI Radeons, which are still to be officially launched. The HD 4850 and 4870 have also been featured in the news pretty much as of late and, by now, we know almost everything there is to know about the cards.
Both cards are going to provide high amounts of graphic power, but the GTX 280 is poised to become NVIDIA's next flagship card. This model will come with a GPU clock speed of 602 MHz, and 1 GB of GDDR3 memory. The 240 processors cores (formerly known as shaders) will be clocked at 1296 MHz, while memory is going to benefit from a maximum speed of 2214 MHz. As we already told you, these clock rates might seem rather strange when compared with NVIDIA's previous cards.
The lower version (which will also come in a dual-slot form factor), is going to come with a GPU clock speed of 576 MHz and will only have 192 processors cores, which will be clocked at 1242 MHz. As for memory, the GTX 260 will provide 896 MB of GDDR3 running at 1998 MHz.
The GeForce GTX 280 is NVIDIA's most complex and powerful GPU to date and contains over 1.4 billion transistors. Based on second generation unified architecture, the GeForce GTX 280 functions as a multi-purpose processor capable of accelerating real-time 3D graphics as well as computationally intensive parallel-computing applications. With a total of 240 shader processors, 80 texture processors, and 1GB of frame buffer memory, the GeForce GTX 280 will provide unprecedented levels of 3D graphics performance.
Since its acquisition of AGEIA, NVIDIA has been porting the PhysX Application Programming Interface (API) over to CUDA. In fact, NVIDIA is in the process of finalizing a driver that will allow the existing 70 million plus GeForce 8 and GeForce 9 based graphics cards to hardware accelerate PhysX applications via CUDA. Also, be on the lookout for a Folding@Home Client and GPU-assisted video transcoding acceleration available with BadaBOOM Media Converter.
By leveraging NVIDIA CUDA Technology, the GeForce GTX 280 can transform itself into a fully programmable multi-processor with 240 cores, on-die shared memory, random read and write capability with 1GB of dedicated memory and the ability to deliver close to one trillion floating point operations per second (teraflop). NVIDIA refers to this mode of operation as computing mode, which can accelerate applications such as video transcoding, physics, and scientific computing.
The cards will be built on a PCI-E 2.0 interface and are expected to provide incredible amounts of graphics power. What is yet to be confirmed is the cards' support for the new NVIDIA technology, CUDA. With this new GPGPU technology (General-purpose computing on graphics units), regular software applications can be accelerated by the graphics processor.
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