GT200 GPUs also have improved performance in geometry shading.Īs of August 2018, the GT200 is the seventh largest commercial GPU ever constructed, consisting of 1.4 billion transistors covering a 576 mm 2 die surface area built on a 65 nm process.
DUAL NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 280 SERIES
The GeForce 200 series GPUs (GT200a/b GPU), excluding GeForce GTS 250, GTS 240 GPUs (these are older G92b GPUs), have double precision support for use in GPGPU applications. Effectively, there were two GTX 260 cards in production with non-trivial performance differences. In late 2008, Nvidia re-released the GTX 260 with 216 stream processors, up from 192. Those that fail to meet the GTX 280 hardware specification are re-tested and binned as GTX 260 (which is specified with fewer stream processors, less ROPs and a narrower memory bus). During the manufacturing process, GTX chips were binned and separated through defect testing of the core's logic functionality. The GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 are based on the same processor core.
DUAL NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 280 UPDATE
And although Nvidia didn't show off a GT200 wafer during my time in Santa Clara, the number of dies is significantly less than the number of G80 dies you could fit on the same 300mm wafer.The GeForce 200 Series introduced Nvidia's second generation of Tesla (microarchitecture), Nvidia's unified shader architecture the first major update to it since introduced with the GeForce 8 Series. Tamasi said that the die size was between 500mm² and 600mm² and from looking at pictures of GT200 wafers, it looks as if Nvidia can fit around 90-100 dies on a 300mm wafer – that's not a lot by any stretch of the imagination. Sadly, Tamasi wasn't keen to delve into the exact size of the die so, to put things into perspective, the package is bigger than G80's enclosure. Moving away on from that, we spent some time talking with Nvidia's Tony Tamasi about the die size, as it's hidden underneath a giant freakin' heatspreader. What's disappointing here is that, generally speaking, Nvidia's partners aren't allowed to move away from the reference design on high-end cards because Nvidia typically sells them a kit with the GPU already soldered onto the PCB. Sadly, there's no direct support for DisplayPort, although Nvidia says that the GPU can support it via a custom add-in card solution. This is very similar to the one included on the original G80-based graphics cards, but there are some additional capabilities included in the new revision – the most notable being support for 10-bit-per-colour outputs. Looking under the heatsink, it's interesting to see that Nvidia has opted to move back to a separate display output controller.
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Both of these connections also support HDMI via a DVI-to-HDMI dongle and, because Nvidia has included a S/PDIF connector next to the two power sockets, audio can be carried across the HDMI connection as well. Moving around to the PCI bracket, there is a pair of dual-link DVI-I outputs, each with the required crypto-ROM keys to drive HD video streams at resolutions up to 2,560 x 1,600.
![dual nvidia geforce gtx 280 dual nvidia geforce gtx 280](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/416pFr51ZIL._AC_SY355_.jpg)
In fact, when you do, your display will not initialise as the card can only draw a maximum of 75W through the PCI-Express interconnect – this is in order to maintain backwards compatibility with older PCIe 1.1 motherboards.
![dual nvidia geforce gtx 280 dual nvidia geforce gtx 280](https://www.guru3d.com/miraserver/images/2008/gtx280/bottom4.jpg)
Unfortunately, you can’t connect a pair of six-pin supplementary power adapters and expect the card to function correctly. More GeForce GTX 280We briefly mentioned power draw on the previous page – Nvidia says that in the worst case, the GeForce GTX 280 reference card will draw around 236W of board power.Īs a result, the card is suitably equipped with both six and eight-pin power connectors both of these need to be connected for the card to work.