Introduction
01
NVIDIA rolled out its
next-generation
GPUs last week. The range-topping
GeForce 280 is an extension of 18-month-old GeForce 8800 GTX in many
ways, with additional power coming from, in the main, a brute force
approach.
Make no mistake about it, folks, GeForce GTX 280 is
easily the fastest
single-GPU graphics card/parallel computing device in mass production.
HEXUS isn't bowled over by its performance guiles for the simple
reason that at £400+, it's just too expensive to recommend.
What's
more, it's riding off the back of old technology, no matter how good
that is. Innovate or die, and NVIDIA's done little of the former.
Now, with future mid-range cards being derived from the 1.4bn
transistor monster, we can make some educated guesses on the kinds of
GPUs we'll see NVIDIA release in subsequent months. They'll be a little
faster than the incumbent 9-series cards, on a pound-for-pound basis,
but won't offer a whole lot more, frankly.
With ATI apparently bowing out of the ultimate single-GPU performance
race, deciding to focus on value through leaner, cheaper-to-produce
architectures, our analysis infers that it has an opportunity to land
a to-the-knees hammer blow with its new mid-range GPUs, which should
liberally use the guts of the decent sub-£100 Radeon HD
3870
as a starting point.
Today sees the
official
launch of the 4-series of Radeon HD cards. They herald
the promise of superlative performance in the mid-range space, where a
large proportion of cards are bought.
We've aggregated all that's been learnt into this one article, so if
you've got between £125 and £175 to spend on a
graphics-card upgrade, you'd be
silly not to read this review.
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