Back with More Stream Processors

When NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 200 series of cards, they were confident that nothing from ATI could possibly rival it. Boasting over a billion transistors, it was indeed ground-breaking stuff. And for a while, it looked like NVIDIA would once again dominate the graphics card market. But that was until ATI responded with their Radeon HD 4800 series of cards.

The new Radeons offered great performance at competitive prices. NVIDIA was taken aback and was quickly forced to drastically slash prices of their newly released GeForce GTX 200 cards. If you can recall, prices of the GTX 280 was lowered by a staggering amount, from US$649 to US$499, whereas the GTX 260 was also brought down from US$399 to US$299. Such dramatic price cuts clearly signaled NVIDIA's surprise at how competitive ATI's latest cards were.

However, this was not the end of NVIDIA's woes. Shortly after, ATI introduced the Radeon HD 4870 X2, dubbed as the world's fastest single card and soon, in the next few weeks to come, ATI is expected to unleash the HD 4850 X2, set to go head to head with the GTX 280.

With ATI making further incursions into the high-end graphics card segment, NVIDIA had to respond and their reply came in the form of this - the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 - so-called because of its 216 stream processors.

Priced at US$279, it is essentially a GeForce GTX 260 with one extra texture processing cluster enabled, thereby giving it 24 more stream processors. With the resulting 216 stream processors, it is now just 24 shy of the top-of-the-range GTX 280. Hence, although it shares the same clock speeds (core: 576MHz; memory: 1998MHz DDR; shaders: 1242MHz) as the regular GTX 260, we're expecting the GTX 260 Core 216 to put in significantly better numbers than the regular variant in our benchmarking tests.