New Release | GTX 260 - GTX 280

**Uber_Tiny** · 06-16-2008, 09:45 AM

A we all know, NVIDIA has released there GTX 2xxx series enthusiasts cards. Available Tuesday the 16th the GTX 280 will be available. Tuesday the 23rd the GTX 2600 will be available.

Below are the specs of the GTX 2xxx series.

This image respectively borrowed from www.hothardware.com

Unfortunately I was not one of the special kids on the block to get one of these to play with. So I will not be able to give a review of the card. I can only make assumptions off what I was told in the briefing with NVIDIA.

On paper the card looks magnificent with it's extremely versitile capability's. Having 933 gigaFLOPS of processing power is amazing. With 1.4 billion transistors and 240 processing cores in 10 cluster on the GTX 2800 makes this a beast of a card.

More Processor Cores
The new second-generation SPA architecture in the GeForce GTX 280 improves performance compared to the prior generation G80 and G92 designs on two levels. First, it increases the number of SMs per TPC from two to three. Second, it increases the maximum number of TPCs per chip from 8 to 10. The effect is multiplicative, resulting in 240 processor cores.

Although not apparent in the above diagram, the architectural efficiency of the GeForce GTX 200 GPUs is substantially enhanced over the prior generation. We’ll be discussing many areas that were improved in more detail, such as texture processing, geometry shading, dual issue, and stream out. In directed tests, GeForce GTX 200 GPUs can attain efficiencies closer to the theoretical performance limits than could prior generations.

And the comparison:
The below table compares the GeForce 8800 GTX to the new GeForce GTX 280 GPU. You will notice sizable increases in a number of important measurable parameters.

On top of all that you have a nice increase of threading capability's with 30,000+ possible threads. The 280 also plays with double precision architecture which was really meant for the professional side of the market.

What kind of applications are serial, what kinds are parallel?
Few, if any, applications are purely serial or purely parallel. Most require both types of operations to varying degrees. Compilers, word processors, Web browsers, and e-mail clients are examples of applications that are primarily serial.

Video playback, video encoding, photo processing, scientific computing, physics simulation, and 3D graphics (raytracing and rasterization) are examples of parallel applications.

Video Encoding
For video encoding, a 110-second clip encodes in 21 seconds on the GeForce GTX 280. The same clip takes 231 seconds on the fastest CPU.

What makes the GeForce GTX 280 a great parallel processor for the PC?
There are three key ingredients:

• CUDA: The greatest obstacle to parallel computing has always been the software. The GeForce GTX 280 supports CUDA, the industry’s first parallel computing language to have deep penetrating (70 million user base) on the PC. CUDA is simple, powerful and offers exceptional scaling on visual computing applications.

• GPU Computing Architecture: The GeForce GTX 280 is designed specifically for parallel computing, incorporating unique features like shared memory, atomic operations and double precision support.

• Many-core architecture: With 240 cores running at 1.3GHz, the GeForce GTX 280 is the most powerful floating point processor ever created for the PC.

• Torrential bandwidth: Due to their high data content, visual computing applications become bandwidth starved on the CPU. With eight on-die memory controllers, the GeForce 280 GTX can access 141GB of data per second, greatly accelerating HD video transcoding, physics and image processing applications.

What is CUDA?

CUDA is a software and GPU architecture that makes it possible to use the many processor cores (and eventually thousands of cores) in a GPU to perform general-purpose mathematical calculations. CUDA is accessible to all programmers through an extension to the C and C++ programming languages for parallel computing.

Does CUDA work on the CPU?

Yes. The upcoming version of CUDA will support multicore CPUs. See the CUDA FAQ for more details: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=36286

Another extremely nice thing about these cards is the fact that you can now use F@H on them. A little late to the ball game, but still able to show that they can play some ball, NVIDIA makes an incredible Folding power house.

Folding@Home, the distributed-computing protein-folding application from Stanford University, runs more than 100× faster on the GPU than on the fastest CPU. Protein folding is measured in nanoseconds per day, or how many nanoseconds of the protein’s life can be simulated in a day’s worth of computing time. A GeForce GTX 280 can fold at 590 ns/day (up from the 511 ns/day discussed at Editor’s Day in May 2008), compared to 4 ns/day on a CPU or 100 ns/day on the Playstation 3.

These results are based on the same protein and equivalent work units.

GPU Physics
Physics simulations are inherently parallel and run very well on the GPU. The table below shows common problems like cloth, soft bodies and fluid simulation. The GPU is on average is 11× faster than a quad core CPU on a preliminary implementation of the PhysX™ engine on the GPU.

With the release of these cards, they are also releasing a new demo called "Medusa" which shows off a couple of characters in a immersive environment environment. Geometry shading for DX10 will be taken off the CPU's shoulders and a new texture scheduler and more floating points means better shader capability's.

While prior-generation GPUs could deliver real-time images that appeared true-to-life in many cases, frame rates could drop to unplayable levels in complex scenes with significant animation, numerous physical effects, and multiple characters. The combination of the sheer shader processing power of GeForce GTX 200 GPUs and NVIDIA’s new PhysX™ technology facilitates many new high-end graphics effects including:

Convincing facial and character animation
Multiple ultra-high polygon characters in complex environment
Advanced volumetric effects (smoke, fog, mist, etc.)
Fluid and cloth simulation
Fully simulated physical effects such as live debris, explosions, and fires.
Physical weather effects such as accumulating snow and water, sand storms, soaking, drying, dampening, overheating, and freezing
Better lighting for dramatic and spectacular effect, including ambient occlusion, global illumination, soft shadows, color bleeding, indirect lighting, and accurate reflections.
Other nice ability's of this card are the fact that you will have less of a performance drop with higher resolutions. As well, there will be more physX possibility's with cross platform support.

Realistic warrior from NVIDIA “Medusa” demo

Gaming Beyond: Extreme HD
GeForce GTX 200 GPUs provide 50-100% more performance over prior-generation GPUs, permitting increased frame rates and higher visual quality settings at extreme resolutions, resulting in a truly cinematic gaming experience.

Far Cry 2 – Extreme HD Dynamic Beauty! (Ubisoft)

Support for the new DisplayPort interface allows resolutions beyond 2560 × 1600, and 10-bit color support permits up to a billion different colors on screen (driver, display, and application support is also required). Note that prior-generation GPUs included internal 10-bit processing, but could only output 8-bit component colors (RGB). GeForce GTX 200 GPUs permit both 10-bit internal processing and 10-bit color output.

Beyond Gaming: High-Performance Visual Computing and Professional Computation
With the power of CUDA technology and the new CUDA runtime for Windows Vista, intensive computational tasks can be offloaded from the CPU to the GPU. GeForce GTX 200 GPUs can accelerate numerous rich-media and computationally-intensive applications such as video and audio transcoding, or running distributed computing applications like Folding@home in the background while surfing the web. Examples of GPU-enabled applications include the RapidHD video transcoding application from Elemental and various video and photo editing applications.
Many engineering, scientific, medical, and financial areas demand high-performance computational horsepower for numerous applications.
Figure 3 shows the amazing speedups that can be achieved by using a GPU instead of a CPU in a number of professional visual computing applications, in addition to mainstream video transcoding. Appendix B lists references and details for these applications.

With an understanding of the GeForce GTX 200 GPU design goals and key objectives, let’s delve deeper into its internal architecture, looking at both the graphics and parallel processing capabilities.

The over all from my understanding is this card is going to kick some ass. But then again, this is all on paper. These cards are supposed to also have a better shader support which will be pretty nice to see in the works. One of the things that stood out for me was how they focused on taking photo realism and making it a realistic Dynamic Realism.

It's really hard to give an over all objective opinion on the card by only viewing the paper data and there is a plethora of other information I would love to talk about. But I will leave that for when I can actually put together a proper review when I am able to test the card on my own.

But from the paper numbers and graphs alone, I would say the GTX 2xxx series cards are going to be a nice upgrade for allot of people.