Nvidias Hottest Weapon Benched!

[Puck]

I can see price drops on the GTX series coming real quick.

Indeed.

 

The gamers for the most part want price:performance cards like 8800gt's, and the benchmarkers will favor the architecture of the ATi cards which have always did really well in benchmarking...even when real world performance ended up lower. Crossfire 2900XTs held the 3dmark orb record for ages even after the nvidia offerings which were clearly the faster cards in real world gaming. My not be important to everyone, but to the benchmarking crowd scores are all that matter. The gt280 does not offer more performance then the 9800GX2 it was ment to replace - and although it is impressive they effectively doubled their gpu core performance, having one for the same price and performance as the last gen stuff is not a smart business move.

 

Not to mention with ati's MUCH lower power draw they can throw two of their gpus on one PCB for dramatic performance increases. The gt280 in a dual core variant has already been agreed on that it will never happen due to the 500+watt rating a single card would have. TT needed a 1KW zalman and a 620watt corsair PSU both so they can run tri-sli without it turning off as soon as a 3d program started...and then they still got the same or less performance as two cards - the extra 650 bucks for a third card literally slowed them down a few times.

 

Even if the beastly 4870X2 ends up being only just as fast as the GT280, it has been confirmed to release at 400 bucks...currently 250 dollars cheaper then the gt280. Not sure how much headroom nvidia can pull on the pricing of the gt280 while still making profits, but with its current price:performance I do not see them selling too many at over 500 bucks.

 

At 450-500 bucks that card would be very impressive...but man...well over 5k PPD...imagine a CUDA superpi benchmark

[kingdingeling]

imagine a CUDA superpi benchmark

That'd kick butt!