Over a year and a half – that's how long the GeForce 8800 GTX remained in the position of what could be called Nvidia's high-end GPU. Oh of course, six months after its release and – just a coincidence – just before the arrival of the R600, we did get an 8800 Ultra with slightly higher clock speeds, but it was nothing revolutionary. Then two and a half months ago, the arrival of the 9800GTX awakened hopes of substantial performance increases, but in the end the card offered only limited gains over the good old GTX, and was behind the Ultra version. For owners of these cards to be really happy with their investment, it was high time for Nvidia to offer more than a few extra megahertz or to rely on pairing two GPUs on the same card.
Finally Nvidia has heard our pleas: The GTX 280 is the first real reworking of the G8x architecture. And, yes, breaking with tradition, "GTX" is a prefix for this new architecture. Now we know the company's modus operandi: Introduce a new architecture on a proven engraving process. Due to the often very high number of transistors, the chip is expensive to produce and the cards that use it remain expensive, but it stakes out the territory. Then during the ensuing years, Nvidia develops its architecture on all segments of the scale, using finer engraving, but it is less optimized for high clock speeds. Finally, when the new process is under control, Nvidia moves it into the high end, which then becomes much more affordable. We saw it with the G70/G71 and the G80/G92, and now history repeats itself with the GT200 – a true killer with 1.4 billion transistors engraved at 0.65 µm.
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Kevin writes: "Multi-GPU gaming was one of those things that seemed like a good idea for as long as it lasted. I mean honestly, the idea of a modular approach to graphics upgrades – be that SLI or CrossFire – was brilliant. I repeat, the idea was brilliant."
Im old school... when i hear the term SLI, I immediately think of 3dfx. I still have a pair of 12mb Monster V2's in an old rig. I never tried out the more modern take on SLI or Crossfire for that matter.
I mean, it was mostly for bragging rights. It was a very temperamental tech that improved with newer iterations, for sure. But folks like myself, who have used it, probably recall that troubleshooting was an integral part of the experience and the value that you got out of the setup was really low.
However, none of that mattered because it looked sick as hell on a well-built PC.
I remember doing my research at the time 😂 I got 2 GTX 460's, as they in SLI were meant to be better than the 480 at the time. Not all games were optimised at the time, which meant some games meant setting them up for 1 card alone. Never forget the time I came home from night shift, turned on my computer like normal, went and made a cuppa, come back and it was still off. Tried to turn on again, and one of the 460's caught fire... good times.
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I really thought this would be a better card. Not a major improvement - considering the price.
£300 for the 260 GTX and it's shіte. I'm waiting on ATI to release their 4000 series now.
Yeah me too. I'm planning on hopefully buying two 4870's.
2x4870 @ $600> 1xGTX 280 @ $600