Nvidia Geforce GTX 280 turns ten years old

Today it is exactly a decade since Nvidia launched its then brand new flagship Geforce GTX 280 and little sibling GTX 260. The series took over after the Geforce 9000 series, which largely consisted of renamed graphics circuits from the Geforce 8000 series and the immensely popular graphics card 8800 GT .

The GT200 graphics circuit was impressive at the time with 1.4 billion transistors on TSMC’s 65-nanometer technology, resulting in an area of ​​a huge 576 mm². Like the previously mentioned series, the architecture was again Tesla, which Nvidia refined to provide better performance in both gaming and general calculations.

The full-scale GT200 housed 240 CUDA cores and had a massive 512-bit memory bus with 1 GB of GDDR3 memory. This was for the top model, while the GTX 260 was released in the slightly scaled-down version 192 stream processors with a memory bus of 448 bits and 896 MB GDDR3.

With the launch, Nvidia consolidated its role as a market leader in terms of performance, but paradoxically, the GTX 280 faced stiff competition from its own ranks. The 9800 GX2 graphics card with two G92 circuits from the 8800 GTS 512 in SLI often performed better in games, drew less power and had the lower price of $ 499. In terms of price, the GTX 280 was at the sky-high $ 649.

The sibling model GTX 260 for 399 dollars generally did better. Shortly afterwards, on June 25, dominance was crushed by AMD, which introduced the Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850, which with the significantly smaller circuit RV770 at 55 nanometers became affordable alternatives. This later led Nvidia to start pushing prices.

AMD’s flagship ATI Radeon HD 4870 placed just above the GTX 260 in terms of performance, but also had the lower price of $ 299. This forced Nvidia to release the GTX 260 216 only months later, where the number of stream processors went up from 192 to just 216.

The rest is, as they say, history and can be read more about in SweClocker’s deep dive into the history of graphics cards.