Going into the summer, NVIDIA must have felt pretty confident about their graphics lineup. Their G92 GPU had been adapted to run in a variety of cards ranging from the GeForce 8800 GS/9600 GSO all the way up to the dual GPU GeForce 9800 GX2. In each of these segments G92 was the unquestioned performance champ, and NVIDIA was still riding the wave of GeForce 8800 GT sales — the 8800 GT will probably go down as one of the most popular graphics upgrades of its era. Meanwhile NVIDIA was preparing to unleash a pair of new graphics cards to take on the high-end segment: the GeForce GTX 260 and the GTX 280.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/NVIDIA_geforce_gtx_260_216shader/