July 7th, 2008
NeoSeeker Initial testing and impressions of the GTX 280
It seems like we were just getting used to NVIDIA’s ninth generation of GeForce, and now, lo and behold, another generation has arrived. This new breed brings a few new changes, and one of these changes is in nomenclature: NVIDIA’s suffixes have now become prefixes, and a zero has been dropped. The GTX 280 is the name of the new flagship video card offered by NVIDIA, and today, we’ll put it through its paces and see how it compares to nine other video cards, including the now dethroned 9800 GTX.
Before getting to this new generation, lets do a quick recapitulation of NVIDIA’s ninth generation. Don’t worry, this will be short — really short, because the 9000 series has only been around since February.
Bucking the usual methodology, NVIDIA kicked off the ninth series with a performance-class card, the 9600 GT. The 9600GT was released primarily to compete against ATI’s HD3850, which was selling for around between $140 and $180. While 9600GT had only 64 stream processors (which, by the way, have also had a name-change, and will henceforth be called processing cores) the card proved fast enough to take on the HD3850.
