14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past few days, we have been extensively covering news of this card – now, it seems that the new GeForce GTX 260 with upgraded GPU has finally received some form of official treatment. Several graphics manufacturers have released the new and improved GeForce card, despite the fact that NVIDIA is yet to unveil the official details regarding it. Moreover, unlike previous NVIDIA-based graphics card releases, the availability of the latest GTX 260 has been announced by only a small number of the company's add-in-board vendors.
As a matter of fact, “small number” could actually be an understatement here, as, more specifically, the vendors in question are BFG Technologies, EVGA and Zotac, and they also announced several models based on the upgraded GTX 260 graphics card. Furthermore, users will now be able to acquire the new card for the same price tag as the initial 192 stream processors-enabled GTX 260 – that is, if we take in consideration EVGA's offering. The pricing strategy could ultimately turn out to be a real issue for graphics card vendors or retailers, as they will most probably end up having to deal with an overstock of the standard GTX 260 cards.
“We sought to squeeze extra performance from the NVIDIA GTX 260 graphics processor. By adding 24 additional processor cores, we saw performance gains up to 10-percent in the latest DirectX 10, OpenGL 2.1 and CUDA enabled 3D games and software applications,” said Carsten Berger, marketing director, ZOTAC International.
“Of course, these cards are great for 3D gaming. But the GeForce GTX 260 MAXCORE is also built for high performance physics and parallel computing,” John Malley, senior director of marketing for BFG Technologies, said. “With the BFG GeForce GTX 260 MAXCORE you get it all — factory overclocked 3D graphics cards with a lifetime warranty, plus a revolutionary physics and computing processor.”
As you probably already know, the new cards only provide a boost of performance offered by the additional 24 stream processors because, aside from that, they feature the same clock speeds as the initial GeForce GTX 260 card, namely 576MHz for the GPU, and 2000MHz for the 896MB of DDR3 memory. The new card also supports NVIDIA's technologies, including PhysX, CUDA and SLI.
