What's so special about the nVidia GeForce 2xx series?

Haven't been able to keep up with the latest in desktop offerings, but was checking out eVGA's website (since I've had great luck with them over the years) and see 260, 280 series cards available and quite expensive I might add.

GPU MHz isn't all that impressive at around 650. Although memory is screaming fast at 2400 MHz (effective). Minimum 550W power supply. Holy S***!

Are these really that great?

 

No. ATI is destroying Nvidia in the Price performance arena. The 4870 from ATI is $300 and as far as I know outruns the 260, or at least keeps up with it. All for $100 less.

They are fast, but not fast enough to warrant such a high price.

 

Yup the new ati lineup is impressive. I'm sure nvidia is going to respond though, and in a big way.

 

The 280 is the fastest desktop card on the market.

 

Until the next one comes out. Then that shiny new $700 video card will become obsolete.
It's both a blessing and a curse I think, that pc tech evolves so rapidly, but that's why I gave up a long time ago on trying to keep up, it's just too expensive.

 

its very cheap to keep up as long as you skip every other step or two steps... and stay a good generation or so behind.

there is no reason to ever spend more than $150 on a gpu.

 

i dont get why people need these 700 cards when they get a 8800/9600 under 300 and play every game max

 

they don't every game maxed out

 

Clearly you have never tried to play Crysis, or Bioshock, or WiC, or R6V, etc. My 640MB 8800GTS struggles with Crysis at medium/high at my native resolution with no AA, to say nothing of the lovely 10-frames-per-second slideshow it becomes on Very High with 4x MSAA.

 

that said what would it take to max out crysis...? or is this even possible yet.? i heard the game is ahead of its time by a long way.

 

the only game i know that cant be maxed out is crysis....which i assumed every one knew as the exception
bioshock you can most def. max out and wic you can max out if you have a very good cpu... isnt assassin's creed and gow more demanding then bioshock (according to pcgamer that gow is one of the most intensive games)
i dont know what r6v is

 

RB6V2 is far too GPU demanding for the poor level of graphics you get with it.

 

crysis forces nVIDIA and ATI's hands, or they forced crysis' appearance in order to force us buy their cards? /irony

 

three gtx 280's overclocked in tri sli with mature drivers and a highly clocked quad will max out crysis fully with some little aa/af, but who would ever buy three of these things, also depends on the res, im guessing at 1920x1200 plus

 

The GTX 280 is the fastest single GPU ever made.

GTX 280 is the fastest: $650
GTX 260 is about 80% as fast: $400.
4870 is competitive with the GTX 260: $300

9800GTX+ is about 80% as fast as the GTX 260: $230
9800GTX is about 90% as fast as the 9800GTX+: $200
4850 is competitive with the 9800GTX: $200

Then again, there are some benchmarks where ATI goes INSANE and beats the hell out of even the GTX 280 (I think this is in Bioshock, where the 4870 destroyed the GTX 280). Also, ATI fixed their crappy AA performance, keeping the 4800 series competitive with Nvidia when AA is enabled.

We don't talk about the 8000 series in the desktop market anymore except for bargain GPUs (the 8800GT should near 130-150 at some point). And this makes the 3870 also a bargain GPU.

Also, the 4800 cards are more power efficient than their equivalent Nvidia card. This is ATI finally back into the game. I love this stuff.

 

http://forums.slickdeals.net/showthread.php?t=854360

That is not a bad price at all, $150 for that card.

 

According to AnAnd although the 4800 series uses less power and its alot more effiecent for its size surprisingly the GT200 series uses less power when you consider its performance. Chart at the bottom of the page. \ http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=7

Kinda nit-picky and it only shows 3 games but I had to point it out And if you're comparing the 4850 to say the 9800gtx+ you may be right i honestly don't know until AnAnd or Tom tells me

 

Crysis is like Doom 3, and to a lesser extent, Half-Life 2. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 left people wondering what kind of super computer would be needed to play, and the games were the "few can run it smoothly" benchmark. Half-Life 2 is both fun and shiny. Doom 3 and Crysis are bland generic shooters.

 

Also the difference was while HL2 had great graphics, it was a well programmed game so that average computers could still run the thing whereas doom 3 and crysis are not well optimized as seemingly meant as a benchmark game rather than an actual game.

 

Crysis is silly. HL2 was not that difficult to max out when it first came out. The only reason Crysis is a problem is because of the half-arsed coding job. I mean... just look at it. Play Crysis on max settings in DX10. Pretty? Sure. Pretty-enough-for-10-fps-on-today's-top-cards? I beg to differ.

 

That was my problem with RB6V2 as well. Although not 10 fps, it ran like crap compared to games I could play on higher settings with better graphics.

 

Here is some info out of PC Gamer:

The new GeForce GTX 280 has 1.4 billion transistors distributed among 240 processing cores, while a Quad Core like QX9650 has 820 million transistors among 4 cores. Get the picture?