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The company of the eery green glow has produced another amazing series of GPUs, with stupendous performance, provided your wallet or plastic can handle it.

It does seem as though AMD simply cannot catch a break of any kind these days, as from one side, Intel attacks with Nehalem, and on the other, nVidia brings off the explosive debut of a couple of GPUs which show an advantage of approximately 150% in comparison to their AMD/ATi rivals. 

Yes, preliminary testing on ZDNet gave a lead of 150% for the NV280 chips over the 3870×2 cards. That must be very demoralizing for ATi fans, as the 4xxx series is close to release, but it is known that no way is a jump similar to the one nVidia made expected.

The 280 series from MaximumPC

the only drawback, for the HTPC crowd, is the extreme length of the card, it necessitates a full size case.

The GTX 280 is an absolute beast of a GPU: Packing 1.4 billion transistors (the 8800 GTX got by with a mere 681 million, and a quad-core Penryn has 820 million), it’s capable of bringing a staggering 930 gigaFLOPs of processing power to any given application (a Radeon HD 3870 delivers 496 gigaFLOPs, while the quad-core Penryn musters just 96).

and

A stock GTX 280 will run its core at 602MHz while its stream processors hum along at 1.296GHz. Memory will be clocked at 1.107GHz. The GTX 260 will have stock core, stream processor, and memory clock speeds of 576MHz, 1.242GHz, and 999MHz, respectively (what, they couldn’t squeeze out an extra MHz to reach an even gig?).

for the non-gamer, interested in CUDA

 CUDA applications will run on any GeForce 8- or 9-series GPU, but the GeForce 200 series delivers an important advantage over those architectures: support for the IEEE-754R double-precision floating-point standard. This should make the new GPUs—and CUDA in general—even more attractive to users who develop or run applications that rely heavily on floating-point math. Such applications are common not only in the scientific, engineering, and financial markets, but also in the mainstream consumer marketplace (for everything from video transcoding to digital photo and video editing).

thankfully, energy efficiency has been a consideration as well

Nvidia has made great strides in reducing its GPUs’ power consumption, and the GeForce 200 series promises to be no exception. In addition to supporting Hybrid Power (a feature that can shut down a relatively power-thirsty add-in GPU when a more economical integrated GPU can handle the workload instead), these new chips will have performance modes optimized for times when Vista is idle or the host PC is running a 2D application, when the user is watching a movie on Blu-ray or DVD, and when full 3D performance is called for. Nvidia promises the GeForce device driver will switch between these modes based on GPU utilization in a fashion that’s entirely transparent to the user.

So while all of this cool is making your mouth water, remember that, like automobiles, “Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?’ Going with a single 280 series card will set you back about $650. Two or three of these cards would be in bank loan territory for most, not to mention the robust power supply that would be needed. On the other hand, expect to see many dual or tri SLI setups for those CUDA applications.

For the home theater enthusiast, it again makes sense to upgrade, as the efficiency has been increased, the speed is increased – taking that much more load from the CPU, and, if using the HTPC as a dual purpose machine, the card supports single slot SLI with an nVidia chipset motherboard, allowing non-gaming very low power use. The 260 series for the HTPC would make a great deal of sense, with only slightly less impressive specs, and a good savings for the user wanting to have something left over for media!

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