Few things piss us off as readily as new
architecture that off ers only incremental
improvements in performance. Fortunate-
ly for Nvidia, that’s not the case with the
GeForce GTX 280. Assuming the drivers
that ship with this card deliver perfor-
mance as good as these beta versions,
Nvidia will have another in what has been
a long list of winners on its hands.
The GTX 280 delivered real-worldbenchmark numbers nearly 50 percent
faster than a single GeForce 9800 GTX
running on Windows XP, and it was
23-percent faster than that card running
on Vista. In fact, it looks as though a single
GTX 280 will be comparable to—and in
some cases beat—two 9800 GTX cards
running in SLI, a fact that explains why
Nvidia expects the 9800 GX2 to fade from
the scene rather quickly.We’re especially pleased with the
performance delta we observed with
Crysis: Even with the resolution at
1920x1200, 4x antialiasing enabled, and
all the game’s other quality settings on
high, our engineering sample delivered
the game at more than 30 frames per
second running DirectX 9. Games still
run slower on Vista, however; Crysis, for
example, shed about eight frames per
second running DirectX 10, but it was
still twice as fast as a single 9800 GTX.
And remember, we tested an engineering
sample running on pre-release drivers.
The GTX 280 absolutely clobbered
AMD’s dual-GPU Radeon 3870 X2,
delivering superior overall benchmarks
in both Windows XP and Vista. The one
bright spot, oddly enough, was the X2’s
Crysis performance in Vista: AMD’s part
managed to run the game two frames per
second faster than Nvidia’s latest. The
single GTX 280, on the other hand, was
more than twice as fast running the RTS
World in Confl ict under Vista.The GeForce GTX 280 in Action
We can’t take the performance of an engineering-sample board with early drivers as gospel, but the benchmark
results have us hungry for shipping productBest scores are bolded. Nvidia-based cards tested with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard; AMD-based cards tested with an Intel
D975BX2 motherboard. Intel 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme CPUs and 2GB of Corsair DDR RAM used in both scenarios. Benchmarks
performed at 1920x1200 resolution on ViewSonic VP2330wb monitors.BENCHMARKS3DMark06: Game 1 (fps) 43.9 31.3 57.6 46.6
3DMark06: Game 2 (fps) 38.8 24.8 45.9 42.0
3DMark Vantage: Game 1 (fps) 17.5 8.0 15.3 9.5
3DMark Vantage: Game 2 (fps) 14.5 7.7 14.8 9.5
Crysis (fps) 22.6 11.7 12.8 24.8
Unreal Tournament 3 (fps) 76.5 75.4 81.4 63.6
Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (fps) 47.8 37.5 40.1 41.7
World in Confl ict (fps) 31.0 19.8 29.0 13.0Prototype PNY 9800 PNY 9800 MSI Radeon
GTX 280 GTX GTX SLI 3870 X2NVIDIA’S NEXT-GEN GPU
NVIDIA’S
NVIDIA’SNVIDIA’S
NVIDIA’SNEXT-GEN
GPUNEXT-GEN
GPUGPU
NVIDIA’SNEXT-GENNEXT-GEN
NVIDIA’S
NEXT-GEN
NVIDIA’SGPU
NVIDIA’SGPU
NVIDIA’SNVIDIA’S
NVIDIA’S
NVIDIA’SNVIDIA’S
NEXT-GENNEXT-GENGPUNEXT-GEN
GPUGPU NEXT-GEN
NVIDIA’SGPU
NVIDIA’SNEXT-GEN
GPUNEXT-GEN
GPUGPUGPU
NVIDIA’SGPU
NVIDIA’SNVIDIA’SGPU
NVIDIA’Sand CUDA in general—even more attractive to users
who develop or run applications that rely heavily on
fl oating-point math. Such applications are common not
only in the scientifi c, engineering, and fi nancial markets,
but also in the mainstream consumer marketplace (for
everything from video transcoding to digital photo and
video editing).POWER CONSIDERATIONS
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.+0| MAXIMUMPC | AUG 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com