back to article Nvidia GeForce GTX 280

Nvidia has spent the past year waiting for AMD to give it a fight in the graphics sector. The G92 chip used in GeForce 8800 GT was little more than a die-shrink of the G80 that debuted in the original GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX. The GeForce 9800 GTX used the same G92 chip and supported DirectX 10 with Shader Model 4.0 - just …

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  1. Jonathan

    No 4800 series?

    Why did you not compare the card to a 4870, or 4870's in CrossFire? After all, two 4870's in CrossFire are cheaper than one GTX280 and perform a lot better.

    Why is the 4800 series not mentioned anywhere here?

  2. b

    strange results for crysis?

    i know crysis is a strange game, but the msi nx8800gt beat the 280 in crysis??? (page3)

  3. Joe K

    Good god almighty!

    All that expense, and a wallet/planet raping 420 watt load, and it still only runs Crysis at 15fps or so on high.

    Jesus, no wonder people are heading towards consoles and macs, things are getting stupid now.

  4. matt

    You'll be waiting a long time

    "We’re waiting for GT200b to bring DirectX 10.1 and GDDR 5 support to the party, and the sooner Nvidia rolls out 55nm fabrication the better."

    Its almost certain that Nvidia will be skipping DX10.1

  5. Leo Waldock

    have patience ...

    HD 4850 and 4870 are coming in a few days time

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    ATI?

    Why was there no mention of ATI in this review at all? Get a nice friendly word of warning from nvidia?

    buerk.

  7. Richy Freeway

    They're already down to £350

    There's been a price drop on the 280 already, we'll be selling them for around £350 inc VAT. This exact model actually.

  8. Brian Miller

    Crysis, Radeon's and dx 10.1

    Heres my £0.02.

    Crysis plays funny buggers whenever you run it in dx10 mode which I am pretty much certain they did. I think the reg should really give the test setup (i.e. OS, running processes etc.) to be sure they show a fair race. It would be easy to adulter results by running one is XP and one in Vista, or running prime95 while benchmarking or something (if you want it to appear crippled).

    This review is an Nvidia piece, and the reg has never really been one to mix and match brands when doing a review, just look at the robodisk one from today. I think it is a fair approach because the target reader normally knows whats what, and if not they will ALWAYS be informed by peoples comments.

    dx 10.1 along with dx10 is a lame duck. Firstly because enthusiast gamers that will pay £££ or $$$ for graphics cards predominantly run windows XP.

    Think about it, if you are gonna pay a %200 premium for a %10 performance boost, then getting another 4-5 FPS for a free downgrade (misgnomer) to windows XP from Vista is a cinch, and seeing that windows XP will never get dx10 you will have to wait until win7 comes about before adoption rates will pick up, and this will likely be dx11 anyway.

    Feel free to differ in opinion but if you do beware, your just plain wrong and likely stupid.

  9. ceecee
    Paris Hilton

    Why no high resolutions?

    Wouldn't going above 1280x1024 give better results in regards to GPU power? Overall good review; just was curious.

  10. Chris

    Crysis

    What's going on with those Crysis benches? Either there's something wrong with the tables, or the test setup, or a sub-£100 9600GT is about as good as the insanely expensive new card...

  11. Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware (Written by Reg staff)

    Re. Crysis

    Says Leo:

    "The figures are right - I retested and they came out that way time after time.

    They look wrong, but it's proper game play and it played like mud with the 'faster' card on those settings."

  12. paul

    PC gaming

    when the PS3 launched a year or two back, it was already been hailed as obslete because of crysis.

    So, two years on - there still isn't a graphics card that can play it.

    (I used to be a big PC gamer , voodoo card quake etc - but the upgrade cycle and MS windows keep me away from it).

  13. StopthePropaganda
    Flame

    I'm a power loving gadget geek but even I don't care about this

    because in order to use DX10 or higher I have to pollute my gaming system with Vista. Which means my 8800 still doesn't run at full capability because Windows refuses to make DX10 for XP Pro. Why the hell would I want to buy an even bigger card that I can't take advantage of because of poor policymaking for the software that drives it?

    Hell, I'll just strap on another 8800 in SLI, still come out with decent power usage, and save an arseload of cash, perhaps even get some performance boost in framerate, even though particle effects and such are still going to be castrated.

    And I don't wanna hear *jack* about DX10.1 unless it RUNS ON XP!

  14. jason
    Stop

    @Richy

    £350? Still way overpriced. Especially if you have to lump in £50+ for a new PSU.

    These high end cards have become pretty redundant for 90% of users as the graphics card requirement is now just limited to what you can afford and what screen resolution you play at.

    For a lot of folks with £400 burning a hole in their pocket on a 22" screen are going to get as much usable performance from spending half that.

    Mid-range rules now and I think AMD's gamble has paid off. These high end cards now look like muscle car dinosaurs. Nice too look at but silly/impractical for day to day use.

  15. Leo Waldock

    clarification about the test system

    Yes the Crysis figures look weird and yes that probably says more about Crysis than it does about the GTX 280.

    I tested with Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 32-bit and Crysis was a fresh installation patched to v1.21

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    @Brian Miller

    > Feel free to differ in opinion but if you do beware,

    > your just plain wrong and likely stupid.

    But may be able to spell ..

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Or, for the price of a GTX280 you could buy an Xbox 360

    ... and have some decent games to play on it as well.

  18. Stu
    Pirate

    PC Gaming has gone mad.

    Recently I put together a nice powerful Quad Q9450 system and 4Gb RAM, plus a not too shabby 8800GTS, the newer type with 512Mb and other changes from the 320Mb models.

    Now imagine my surprise when I put Crysis on it, foolishly thinking that I could put the settings on at least High (not highest), as I watched my system grind to a painful halt. You could measure the frames per second in minutes.

    I haven't built a PC system in about four years before this one after realising that I got into that flow of buying the biggest fastest systems. I stopped when it went all sour when the games required MORE than what the latest gfx cards could process.

    So it seems things carred on getting sourer and sourer to the state of utter madness.

    And now it seems even this ridiculously expensive state of the art card STILL doesn't allow crysis to run at high settings at high resolutions. How old is Crysis now? I dread to think how badly it performed when it first came out.

    Just madness.

    I'm not a console gamer generally, but something led me down the path of getting an XBox 360, then a PS3. I still cringe at some of the arcadey shallow-arsed titles available, but the new GTA4 seemed to justify my decision.

    ...Not that Crysis is a cerebral piece of gameplay in itself!

    There is a clear 1:1 relationship when designing games for consoles, 1xConsole performance = 1xGame performance. Easy to achieve seeing as all consoles are created equal.

    PC gaming has just gone insane due to the inherent anti-equilibrium (cool new word combo!). I'm surprised the whole industry hasn't crashed and burned due to this hardware-Software divide.

    .

    And what is it with those graphs? the GX2 and 8800GT (in different tests) seem to come out better all round. I'm presuming this is because GX2 is two boards in one package, but still isn't it cheaper than the 280?

    So why is the 280 better then?

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