Well nVidia is starting with the hi end, hi proced items. Now we wait to see what ATI has and decide. I'm very much looking forward to the ATI release this week.

Reply

Yeah but for the performance of these cards, the price isn't quite right. I mean you can get two 8800GTs for under $400 and they typically outperform both the 260 and the 280. Yes if you want a single card, these aren't too bad a deal. But even the 9800GX2 outperforms the 280 normally.

So really I have to question the pricing on them. High end for a single GPU card yes. Better price/performance than last generations card, no. I just bought two G92 8800GTSs and now I don't feel dumb about it because my two cards that I paid $170 for each will still outperform the latest and greatest which cost more.

Reply

Maybe lack of any real competition from ATI?

Reply

That competition won't come for another two weeks, but when it does -- rumour has it NV plan to lower their prices. Most preliminary info has HD 4870 at 299-329 and pretty much GTX 260 performance, if not, then biting at it's heels.

Reply

You haven't seen anything yet. check out this picture of the GTX2 290!! http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=350t4rt&s=3

Reply

Soon it will be that way if Nvidia has their way.

Reply

No, The reason is high cost to produce. over a Billion transistors, low yields, 512 bit bus ...

Unfortunately the high cost and the advance tech doesn't translate to equally impressive performance at this stage. For example, if the card had much lower power usage under load, still it would have been considered a good move forward for having comparable performance to a dual GPU solution but with much cooler running and less demanding hardware.

As the review mentions, this card begs for a die shrink. It will make it use less power, be cheaper, run cooler and even have a higher clock.

Reply

While I don't wish to simply another person who complains on the Internet, I guess there's just no way to get around the fact that I am utterly NOT impressed with this product, provided Anandtech has given an accurate review.

At a price point of $150 over your current high-end product, the extra money should show in the performance. From what Anandtech has shown us, this is not the case. Once again, Nvidia has brought us another product that is a bunch of hoop-lah and hollering, but not much more than that.

In my opinion, for $650, I want to see some f-ing God-like performance. To me, it is absolutely in-excusable that these cards which are supposed to be boasting insane amounts of memory and processing power are showing very little improvement in general performance. I want to see something that can stomp the living crap out of my 8800GTX. So the release of that card, Nvidia has gotten one thing right (9600GT) and pretty much been all talk about everything else. So far, the GTX 280 is more of the same.

Reply

Maybe I'm behind the loop here. The only competition this article refers to is some up coming new INTEL product in contrast to an announced hard release of the next AMD GPU series a week from now?



Reply

They just keep making these cards bigger and bigger. More transistors, more heat, more juice. All for performance. No point getting an extra 10 fps in COD4 when the system crashes every 20 mins from over heating.

Reply