Geforce GTX 295 Preview

The guys at Guru 3D have previewed the new Geforce GTX 295!

No matter what game you'll play with the GeForce GTX 295, you'll play it at dazzling framerates, very high resolutions and the very best in image quality. We have shown you the performance of some pretty hot titles. Surely Left 4 Dead based on the HL-2 source engine is a pretty easy task for any modern graphics card, but the card scaled just so well. And when we look at Far Cry 2, we see more of the pretty jawbreaking performance. The same goes for Call of Duty World at War and obviously the other titles we tested. You will not have to forfeit on image quality settings and you can play in the highest resolutions. But that is of course expected. Also and I do have to mention this, the GTX 295 will be a graphics card for users with a high resolution monitor. The overall performance really starts to kick in after roughly 1920x1200, a resolution where more and more pixels need to be rendered and where GPU limitation normally kicks in pretty fast... So keep in mind that cards like these really start to show off in the higher resolutions.

Click here for the full preview.

Geforce GTX 200 Architecture Review

XBitLabs has put up an architecture review of the new Geforce GTX 200 series. Take a peek at what they have to say!

New Nvidia chip codenamed G200 was supposed to top the traditional approach to GPU design: the most complex, the most expensive, the most powerful and of course the fastest of all. Everything was at stake here: the company didn’t stop at anything trying to prove to the world who the real king of consumer 3D graphics was.

To read the full article, click here.

EVGA Geforce 260 reviewed

Ocia.net have just reviewed the new EVGA Geforce 260 graphics card.

Here is what they have to say about the card,

I have nothing but good things to say about EVGA. Their customer service folks are top notch and a pleasure to deal with, and their Step-Up program is just one of many benefits they offer to their buyers. Another is lifetime warranty, as long as you register your product through their online website. This is my second EVGA card, my original 8800GTS I used as trade-in for the GTX 260, and both worked flawlessly as long as I've owned them. While there was no game bundled with the plain-jane Step-Up card, many retail versions include one. As far as the rest of the bundle, all the required adapters and software are present and the inclusion of the overclocking Precision utility is a welcome addition.

To read the full review, click here.

XFX Cash Back on Geforce GTX 200 Series

In response to recent market fluctuations, XFX is taking the history-making stance of offering up to $120 cash back to its dedicated technology-forward customers who purchased its GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards between June 16, 2008 and July 11, 2008. This offer is available only to customers and purchases in the US and Canada. Rules and certain restrictions apply.
"Market conditions in recent days have caused the price of these two graphics cards to drop significantly," explains XFX USA President, Eddie Memon. "However these cards were just introduced to our customers a few weeks ago. We want to thank our customers for their continued loyalty, and also to reassure them that we are committed to them and to their ongoing satisfaction."
And, for those who have been wanting these cards but price has been a barrier, the new price structure is a big bonus. Both graphics cards harness the power of second generation unified architecture, SLI technology and top-of-the-line DirectX 10 support, creating a gaming "reality" that, thanks to blazing fast frame rates, is a truly in-your-face experience.
The GeForce 280 GTX features second generation NVIDIA® Unified Architecture that delivers 50% more gaming performance (compared to the first generation) thanks to 240 enhanced processor cores and a graphics clock of 602 MHz that provide incredible shading horsepower. The GeForce® 260 is no slouch, either, with 192 Processor Cores and a graphics clock of 576 MHz.

NVIDIA's new GPU PhysX™ technology renders convincing facial expressions, multiple ultra-high polygon characters in complex environments and convincing physical effects like weather and explosions. Both cards come NVIDIA PhysX®-Ready, however NVIDIA Phys drivers are required to experience in-game GPU PhysX acceleration.
NVIDIA CUDA™ technology and the new CUDA runtime for Windows Vista enables programmers to offload the most intensive processing tasks from their CPU to their graphics card(s), putting the power of up to 240 multi-threaded processor cores to work for you. From transcoding video or running Folding@home in the background while web surfing, GeForce® GTX 200 graphics cards deliver performance improvements of up to seven times a tradition CPU.
GigaThread™ Technology, Lumenex™ Engine, 16x Anti-aliasing Technology, and 128-bit floating point High Dynamic-Range (HDR) Lighting guarantees top-of-the-line performance right out of the box. OpenGL 2.1 support, Dual Dual-link DVI Support, PureVideo® HD Technology and dual-stream hardware acceleration rounds out the leading features.

Yup, you heard it right, if you were one of those early adopters of the card, XFX will pay you back cold hard cash for the price drop for this product.

Source: Hothardware

ASUS ENGTX260 TOP 896MB (NVIDIA GTX260) Review

Overclock3D has a review of the Geforce ENGTX260 graphics card.

While the GTX280 may still be king of the latest gen when it comes to performance, ASUS have certainly closed the gap with the release of their pre-overclocked ENGTX260 TOP. Coming within only a few insignificant FPS in most games and showing good potential to take things even further with a bit of manual overclocking using nTune, the performance of the card is really quite stunning.

Shifting these FPS results over to our "Cost Per Frame" scale reveals that the ENGTX260, with its £220 retail price, does sit comfortably at the lower end of the scale, offering a good balance of performance to price. Ideally, we would have liked to place the card head-to-head with a pre-overclocked AMD HD4870 considering this card has been touted as its rival, but as supply of these cards is fairly thin on the ground for most AIB partners, this is something that is going to have to wait until a later date.

To read the full review click here.

Geforce GTX 200 Series Prices Falling

With the excellent ATI 4800 cards, NVIDIA is facing stiff competition and in a response to that, it has dramatically decreased the prices of it's flagship cards, with the GTX 280 seeing a pricefall of almost 200 dollars!!

Newegg shows an offering on a GeForce GTX 280 graphics card for $459.99 after a $40 mail-in-rebate and cards from other brands like Asus and Palit are also available for around $499. It seems NVIDIA is cutting the price extremely hard. A couple of days ago you had to shelve out $649 for a GTX 280 but now you can get it for almost $200 less.
Furthermore, the GeForce GTX 260 is now available for $299.99 and ZipZoomfly even has one with a $40 mail-in-rebate so the card costs only $259.

Source: Guru3d.com

Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 analysis

If you are interested in learning out exactly how NVIDIA has implemented it's cutting edge technology into this amazing graphics card, head over to bit-tech.net to get a full scoop of the Geforce GTX 280 architecture along with a review.

Source: bit-tech.net | Review - GT200: Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 analysis

Geforce GTX 260 Review

This puppy by Point of View has been reviewed over at Guru3d.com. To read the full review click here. The card is priced at $399 and provides excellent performance.

Performance wise this is just a very fun product, playing Race Driver: GRID at 1920x1200 with 4x MSAA enabled at 55 frames per second is just brilliant. When we take S.t.a.l.k.e.r. with every possible image quality setting enabled including Dynamic lighting we still push 52 frames per second on average and these are just really good numbers. The one card the GTX 260 consistently came close with (performance wise) was actually the diminished GeForce 8800 Ultra.

EVGA Geforce GTX 280 FTW Edition Review

The fine folks over at Nvnews.net have reviewed the EVGA Geforce GTX 280 Edition.

To read the full review click here.

The GeForce GTX 280 outperformed the GeForce 8800 GTX at the resolution of 1920x1200, but delivered the best bang for the buck at 2560x1600 and with high quality (16xQ) antialiasing at 1680x1050. Overall increases in the average frame rate at these settings ranged from 57% to 92%. While the increase in performance at these extreme settings will command a premium price, NVIDIA has finally delivered a true successor to the awesome GeForce 8800 GTX.

Download NVIDIA Physx Enabled Foreceware 177.39

If you cannot wait for the official release of the Physx enabled drivers, here is the link to download them and I saw this over at hardforum.com

Nvidia Forceware 177.39 for Microsoft Windows Vista (64-bit) - [DOWNLOAD]
Nvidia Forceware 177.39 for Microsoft Windows Vista (32-bit) - [DOWNLOAD]
Nvidia Forceware 177.39 for Microsoft Windows XP Professional / Windows Server 2003 (64-bit) - [DOWNLOAD]
Nvidia Forceware 177.39 for Microsoft Windows XP Professional / Home Edition (32-bit) - [DOWNLOAD]
Nvidia PhysX Driver 8.06.12 (All Windows O/S) - [DOWNLOAD]

 

Download links courtesy gamebeat.net and for [H]ard|OCP / [H]ard|Forum only  This combination of drivers should enable Geforce accelerated PhysX support on all G92 and GT2XX cards. Support for older G80 cards is said to be coming in a future driver release.
[EDIT: Apparently these drivers only support the 9800GTX, 9800GTX+, and GT2XX 'out of the box' as it were. If you want to use them with older G92 based cards you'll need to modify the .inf]
Information on exactly what PhysX titles are currently supported seems sketchy at best at the moment. As of this post I know that it works for 3DMark Vantage (ugh!) and Unreal Tourney 2K3 (with PhysX patch).