Digital Home Thoughts: GeForce GTX 280 Brings High Performance Computing

"NVIDIA is releasing two new high-end graphics cards called GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 (official photo gallery), both are part of the GTX 200 Series. The timing is perfect: it will allow the NVIDIA to sweep contracts for the second half of the year. In the GPU world, performance is the name of the game, and this is not a small update. Engineers have improved many aspects of the GPU, increasing efficiency and performance wherever they could, in addition of adding raw processing power by integrating more 240 stream processors* (versus 128 previously) along with additional internal memory and to optimize performance. Let's cut to the chase: here is the minimum that you should know about the GTX 200 Series"

Sadly I have not been following the video card market closely for some time now, basically since I switched to using laptops (just sheer chance and convenience, not by design or anything) so it was nice to read this article about how far video cards have come in the last two years. The GTX 280 is apparently the fastest single-GPU solution now out and looking at some of the benchmarks, it is incredible what it is capable of outputting. However, much like it was 2-3 years ago, when the highest end video cards were between $500-$600, the same is true now with the GTX 280 setting you back around $600. Having said this, you should recognize the fact that High-Performance Computing is clearly going mainstream. According to the article, even low-end graphics processors will, in time, have enough processing power to outperform a high-end, many-core CPU in specific tasks such as video compression.