NVIDIA launches new GPUs, ATI lies in wait
Today was originally scheduled to be the date that both NVidia and ATI launched their next-generation graphics products, but NVidia had the only one that made it out the door in time.
NVidia's GeForce GTX 200 GPU series (comprised of the 260 and 280 units) has now been made available. The 280 is equipped with 240 cores, and offers 1 GB of frame buffer memory, while the 260 has 192 processors and 896 MB of memory. They cost $649 and $399 respectively through such sites as Amazon, Newegg, TigerDirect, MWave, MCIX, and ZipZoomfly.
As Tom's Hardware reported earlier this month, AMD delayed the launch of its Radeon HD 4800 series graphics cards from today to June 25 so it would not lose any of its "face time" to NVIDIA. Instead, the company today showed off its "Cinema 2.0 Experience", an ecosystem built around the forthcoming RV770 cards that are capable of performing 1 teraflop/sec. of graphical computing. The demo system in San Francisco featured two of those graphics cards, driven by an AMD Phenom X4 quad core processor and AMD 790 FX chipset.
The Radeon HD 4800 series will replace ATI's current 3800s and are expected to begin at under $200. Certain sites have had spec sheets posted of ATI's products since April of this year.