GeForce GTX 260 core 216

After the release of the Radeon HD 4800 series, AMD seriously squeezed NVIDIA out of the market with its GeForce GTX 280/260 based on the GT200 chip, which is why the latter had to reduce prices on its top video cards. And if the senior accelerator of the Californians was unattainable in terms of performance, then the GeForce GTX 260 lost to its competitors in some applications. After some "thoughts", NVIDIA released an updated version of the "affordable" hi-end card. After vague renaming of old products, NVIDIA finally released a new generation of video cards based on the GT2008 in the summer of 200, which turned out to be one and a half times more productive than their predecessors. The announcement of AMD's solutions turned out to be no less significant, and a couple of months later the Californian company presented an updated GeForce GTX 260 card, having reduced prices for the new line of video adapters by this time.

 

The GT200 GPU consists of ten TPCs (Texture Processing Clusters) and eight wide ROPs capable of rendering four pixels per clock (32 in total). Each cluster has 24 stream processors and eight TMUs each, for a total of 240 stream processors and 80 texture units, but for the GeForce GTX 260, only eight TPCs and seven wide ROPs were used. Naturally, 192 stream processors, 64 TMUs, and 28 ROPs affected performance. In addition, the GT200 chip supports 512-bit access to GDDR3 memory with a total capacity of 1024 MB, but for this video card, the bus was cut to 448 bits, and the memory capacity is only 896 MB. The operating frequencies were also adjusted downwards: 576/1242 MHz and 1998 MHz versus 602/1296 MHz and 2214 MHz, chip/stream processors and memory, respectively. But this was not enough to demonstrate performance similar to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and the number of TPC clusters was increased to nine, which gave 216 stream processors and 72 texture units, operating at all the same 576/1242 MHz. The frequency and memory bus remained unchanged, as did the number of ROPs.

Characteristics of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 core 216

Name	GeForce GTX 260 core 216
Core	GT200 (D10U-20)
Process technology (µm)	0.065/0.055
Transistors (millions)	1400
Core frequency	576
Memory operating frequency (DDR)	999
Bus and memory type	GDDR3 448-bit
Bandwidth (Gb/s)	111,89
Unified shader units	216
Unified shader unit frequency	1242
TMU on conveyor	72
ROP	28
Shader Model	4.0
Fill Rate (Mpix/s)	16128
Fill Rate (Mtex/s)	41472
DirectX	10
Interface	PCIe 2.0

 Overall, the new GTX 260 turned out to be simply brilliant; the card is an excellent choice for gamers who value excellent speed for reasonable money.