Nvidia GeForce GTX 260/280 Review

By Florian Charpentier, Fedy Abi-Chahla
published

ROPs

As we’ve seen, the number of ROPs has increased, but they haven’t gained any new features. But admittedly, the G8x ROPs were already quite complete, with support for 16- and 32-bit floating-point frame buffers with blending and antialiasing; antialiasing up to 8x or 16x in CSAA mode; Z rendering that’s eight times faster; etc. Not much needed to be added. So Nvidia made a point of optimizing performance. For blending in RGBA8 frame buffers, the G8x/G9x saw their performance divided in half, with 12 pixels per cycle. With the GT200 that limitation has been eliminated, with the addition of a 512-bit bus – with a bandwidth of more than 140 GB/s, the new ROPs should make the new GeForce cards unbeatable for fill rates. Here are the results for Z pixel rate:

gtx 260 280

As for raw performance, the results are no disappointment, setting a new record: 75,537 Mpixels/s! Still that’s a disappointing score in that it’s only a fourfold, and not an eightfold increase in the base fill rate. For the 9800 GTX, we posted a value of 5.2 – it was a little better, but again it remained well below the theoretical level.

Florian Charpentier
149 Comments Comment from the forums
  • BadMannerKorea
    FIRST OMFG NVIDIA pwns!
    Reply
  • Lunarion
    what a POS, the 9800gx2 is $150+ cheaper and performs just about the same. Let's hope the new ATI cards coming actually make a difference
    Reply
  • foxhound009
    woow,.... that's the new "high end" gpu????
    lolz.. 3870 x2 wil get cheaper... and nvidia gtx200 lies on the shelves providing space for dust........
    (I really expectede mmore from this one... :/ )
    Reply
  • thatguy2001
    Pretty disappointing. And here I was thinking that the gtx 280 was supposed to put the 9800gx2 to shame. Not too good.
    Reply
  • cappster
    Both cards are priced out of my price range. Mainstream decently priced cards sell better than the extreme high priced cards. I think Nvidia is going to lose this round of "next gen" cards and price to performance ratio to ATI. I am a fan of whichever company will provide a nice performing card at a decent price (sub 300 dollars).
    Reply
  • njalterio
    Very disappointing, and I had to laugh when they compared the prices for the GTX 260 and the GTX 280, $450 and $600, calling the GTX 260 "nearly half the price" of the GTX 280. Way to fail at math. lol.
    Reply
  • NarwhaleAu
    It is going to get owned by the 4870x2. In some cases the 3870x2 was quicker - not many, but we are talking 640 shaders total vs. 1600 total for the 4870x2.
    Reply
  • MooseMuffin
    Loud, power hungry, expensive and not a huge performance improvement. Nice job nvidia.
    Reply
  • compy386
    This should be great news for AMD. The 4870 is rumored to come in at 40% above the 9800GTX so that would put it at about the 260GTX range. At $300 it would be a much better value. Plus AMD was expecting to price it in the $200s so even if it hits low, AMD can lower the price and make some money.
    Reply
  • vochtige
    i think i'll get a 8800ultra. i'll be safe for the next 5 generations of nvidia! try harder nv crew
    Reply