VR Features

When the NVIDIA G80 first arrived, it brought with it the joy of shader processing for consumer PC graphics. The NVIDIA G92 went on to move this performance to a more affordable level, apart from making NVIDIA ownership a less cranky experience. As with most technolgical product cycles, the trickle-down is followed by a roller coaster ride up the next performance level. What we have with us today is the NVIDIA GT 200 chipset manifesting itself in the form of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB, packing 240 Shader Processors into a 65nm BGA package.

 

 

The big deal, of course, lies in the raw increase of pixel-pushing power. Extra pixels to fill the HD display that you broke the piggy bank for. Video acceleration continues to be handled by NVIDIA's VP2 Engine, so whatever benefits of PureVideo 2 will be retained in this new product range. Notably, the 240SP GeForce GTX 280 will take on NVIDIA's previous flagship power-guzzler, the GeForce 9800 GX2, with the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 being the only commercial threat from the Red Camp. Till the RV770, maybe. With no major architectural changes, it only means that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 will not support Shader Model 4.1 and DirectX 10.1.

 

 

Before we move on, we have a table comparing the specifications of both the older GeForce 9800 GX2 and the just-released GeForce GTX 280.

 

	NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 1GB	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 1GB
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 65nm	TSMC 65nm
Core Clock	600MHz	602MHz
Stream Processors	256 (128 per core)	240
Shader Processor Clock	1500MHz	1296
Texture Units	128 (64 per core)	80
Raster Units	48 (24 per core)	32
Memory Bus	256-bit on individual core	512-bit
Memory Clock	2000MHz	2214MHz
Memory Capacity	1GB (512MB per core)	1GB
PCI-E Power Connectors	1 8-pin, 1 6-pin	1 8-pin, 1 6-pin