I don't know about you, but I'm this close to growing tired of all the recent news concerning NVIDIA's upcoming next-generation graphics cards. There is so much information available on the subject that, by now, you should know these cards like they were your own. Starting with the technical sheet and ending with an estimated price tag, NVIDIA's GT200 series of GPUs have been highly speculated upon which, in turn, has left us eagerly waiting until one of these cards hits the stores.

With all that, if you have been wondering what the next GeForce lineup will score in 3DMark06, or about how capable it will be of handling Crysis, you need not wonder anymore. Apparently, The Inquirer has succeeded in getting their hands on the GTX 280 and GTX 260 graphics cards. And they did what any journalist would have done with two cards that haven't been officially announced, that is, they put them through a series of tests. Should we trust the numbers released by The Inquirer, NVIDIA's new lineup isn't quite what everyone might have expected on the performance side.

With the help of a desktop computer system that was based on the Intel QX9650 CPU (clocked at 3.0 GHz), the two cards came up with not so-impressive 3DMark2006 results. Both cards were also tested using 3DMark Vantage and the famous PC game Crysis. Although they were able to pull good frame rates in Crysis, in 3DMark2006, the cards failed to offer very impressive results. Apparently, while faster than ATI's RV770-based 4870 card, the fact that the difference between them was not that significant would indicate that ATI's less expensive cards are better than what NVIDIA is offering.

Still, the numbers are not yet official and we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that NVIDIA's next-generation graphics will not provide the expected performance number. Personally, I'm not convinced about a card's performance level until I get to test one for myself.