NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
No revolution happened. New GT200 graphics engine and GeForce 280GTX video card tested today are just products of further evolution of Unified Shader Architecture from NVIDIA Company. The new graphics engine contains more functional blocks than its predecessors, which gives right to call it the most powerful GPU thus far. Mention should be made, that along with high performance in 3D-application, the new chip aspires to win the first place in the realm of distributed computations. At the moment, it is a Folding@Home project. Here is a device driver for this video card.
We should not forget about computation technologies based on NVIDIA Cuda graphics engines, and acceleration of “physics” in games. The latter will be completely compatible with AgeiA PhysX engine, and only special driver will be needed, which is about to appear in the offing. However, it is unclear how far the new GT200 chip will be called for in non-graphic computations, but even this aspect will be subject to our discussions in future articles, when all necessary drivers and utilities will be at hand.