NVIDIA going after Intel with GeForce GTX 280 / 260 next-gen cards
May 22, 2008 by Peter Chubb
Filed under Computer Hardware, Computers

It seems that NVIDA have been making some big noise of late about slimming down their product line of graphics cards, and are also going after Intel and some of their business. With that kind of announcement, you would have thought that the new summer line-up from NVIDIA would be something special, but I am afraid to say that it is much the same as what they already have. NVIDIA have two new graphics cards coming in their summer line-up, the GeForce GTX 260 and the GeForce GTX 280, both of which are next-gen cards.
Both will use the D10U graphics core; however the GTX 280 is the full fat version of the processor which uses all of the 240 unified stream processors. The GTX 260 will only use 192, so is a watered down version. Both the 260 and 280 GPU’s support three-way SLI, NVIDIA are also planning to incorporate PhysX support however; as yet there are no details on this, we will just have to wait until the June 18 launch.
As we mentioned above, both cards will use the D10U processor, these are said to be 50% better than the shaders which were used on the older D9 GPU’s. One thing that you need to know about the D10U chipset though, it does not offer support for DirectX extensions above 10.0. It does seem to me that with the launch of both the GeForce GTX 280 / 260 next-gen cards, NVIDIA are not doing enough to go after Intel.
