Thread: Nvidia XFX GeForce GTX 280 Graphic Card

GRAPHICS CARDS HAVE been flying into our labs at a rapidly increasing rate of late. The GPU market is bubbling over with loads of new releases, and we're getting the biggest, fastest cards out there. This time around, we're putting Nvidia's flag¬ship GPU, the GTX 280, through the wringer. Design and Features The XFX GeForce GTX 280 certainly looks the part-it's a massive full-length dual-slot card, with menacing green graphics. It isn't too heavy, and is a lot lighter than ATI's 4870X2, though that card does have two GPUs inside. The GTX 280 GPU that's beneath that cooler is quite some beast itself. It has well over one billion transistors, 1 GB of DDR3 RAM, support for physics hardware acceleration and Nvidia's CUDA technology. The GTX 280 clock speeds are: 670 MHz on the GPU core, 1107 MHz on the 1GB ofGDDR3 running through a 512-bit bus and 1296 MHz on the Shader clock.

CUDA, or the Compute Unified Device Archi tecture basically allows the GPU to act like a very fast CPU for certain tasks, such as video transcoding and distributed computing. The physics acceleration is of more interest to gamers, but at the time of writing, there aren't too many games that have proper physics features. There is a long list of upcoming games that will support it, so it's something to look forward to. The card needs a six-pin as well as an eight-pin PCI-Express power connector, and a good 550 watt SMPS to run it. Performance This is a very fast GPU. We tested in with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650, 2 GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2 RAM, a 300 GB Western Digital Velociraptor, and a Gigabyte EP45-DS3R motherboard, all powered by a Tagan B2-1300 PSU.



In 3D Mark 2006, it scored 14,904 points, while in 3D Mark Vantage, under the Performance Preset, it got 11326 points. These are not the absolute highest scores we've seen the Radeon 4870X2 holds that honor-but they are very, very high. In our gaming tests, the GTX 280 did very well in Company of Heroes, getting 158 frames per second at a resolution of 1920 x 1200 with the settings maxed out. This is higher than the 4870X2 by eight frames. It repeated this in World in Conflict, getting 42 frames to the 4870X2's 39, and in Unreal Tournament 3, getting 120 frames per second. Devil May Cry was a bit of setback vis-avis the 4870X2, since it managed only 100 frames per second as compared to the 4870X2's 170.

From a gameplay perspective though, 100 frames is very high, so the distinction is largely academic. Crysis was a win for the 4870X2, especially with Anti Aliasing turned on. With 8X M and very high settings at 1920 x 1200, the GTX 280 got 18 frames, while the 4870X2 got 30 frames. The 4870X2 seems unaffected by anti-aliasing, possibly due to its dual-GPU structure. Conclusion After testing this card, we got the impression that its power is not being fully utilized by the current generation of games and applications. It's a very fast card, though not the fastest, but the extra features that it has (PhysX, CUDA), will probably start to make a difference only in a few months from today. At that point, it might become an even better buy. The price does need to drop quite a bit though before it can be called a stellar buy.