Some of you might consider that disclosing the performance details of a graphics card that hasn't yet been released is just like having someone tell you how a movie ends before you even get a chance to see it for yourself. Nevertheless, the general public will most certainly appreciate if NVIDIA next-generation GTX 280 graphics card went into a neck-and-neck competition with the company's current high-performance card, the GeForce 9800 GTX. Well, thanks to a couple of journalists for whom signing NDAs is not an option, we now have scores of the GTX 280, put as it was through 28 tests.

As most of you already know, NVIDIA's next-generation high-end graphics card is expected to provide 50 percent more performance than the company's current flagship model, the GeForce 9800 GTX. And, if we're to trust the above mentioned sources, the GTX 280 is capable of providing the anticipated performance level, as most of the 28 tests have revealed.

The testing platform included a Core2 Extreme X9650 CPU clocked at 3.00 GHz, while the GeForce 9800 GTX had to be overclocked in order to become a real competitor for the GTX 280. With 3DMardk Vantage, the GTX 280 easily provided over 50% more than its younger brother, scoring 10388.30 points in Performance and 4839.97 points in Extreme, which is with 61.03% and 107.73% respectively more than what the GeForce 9800 GTX (OC) achieved.

Overall, the GTX 280 is considerably better than the OC'ed GeForce 9800 GTX - the only two tests where the GeForce 9 series card performed better were in the Lost Planet Game. Running at 1280x1024x32 resolution, the GTX 280 scored lower than its competitor in the Cave sequences for the DirectX 9 and DirectX10 versions. The difference was of only 6.33% and 4.00%, respectively.

As we said before, all we need to do now is to wait until NVIDIA finally goes official with the new card, and then until it becomes available in stores. By then, we will know everything there is to know about the GTX 280.