geforce-gtx-260 posts

Nvidia has been cranking out the new releases of drivers for its products lately. Last week it announced its new GeForce 200 series of graphics chips and Thursday it released some new official drivers (117.41) for the GTX 280 and 260 chips. The new releases are mainly for some minor issues.

However those who want to walk on the wild side and have the GTX 280 or 260 cards installed on their PCs or a GeForce 9800 GTX card can also download some new beta drivers (177.39). These beta drivers allow for PhysX hardware game physics support for games that have those features implemented. Nvidia Bought PhysX earlier this year and this represents their first attempt at bringing the hardware support directly into their graphics cards. Again these are beta drivers so that means download and install them at your own risk.

It's a new one-two punch if you happen to own the right graphics card. AMD has just released their new monthly Catalyst drivers for their ATI based Radeon graphics chips. The 8.6 versions of the drivers can be downloaded at AMD's game web site and the release notes show a number of fixes and improvements for a large number of games in both XP and Vista, including BioShock, Sins of a Solar Empire, Call of Duty 4, Lost Planet, Crysis and others.

Not to be outdone, Nvidia has also released new Forceware drivers specifically for their new Geforce GTX 280 and 260 graphics chips. The new 177.35 version of the drivers also support the new nForce 780a and 750a SLI motherboards for their HybridPower features (Vista OS only). Keep in mind that this new driver release is only for the new Geforce chips; older chips are not officialy supported.

The newest launch of the top end performance graphics chips is the introduction today of the new Geforce GTX 200 series from Nvidia. The high end is represented by the Geforce GTX 280 which is set to launch tomorrow with graphics cards by a number of different companies. Cards with this version of the chip are expected to set you back $649.

So what do you get with that amount of cash? You get a graphics card that, among other things, supports the PhysX game physics software (which Nvidia bought earlier this year). The press release quotes Chris Taylor, the head of Gas Powered Games, as saying they plan to support PhysX with their upcoming action-RPG Space Siege, saying, "And in the near-future, you're going to see real-time, Hollywood cinematic-level environmental effects on GPUs like the GeForce GTX 280. We're talking about some wicked-cool technology here!" Nvidia also claims that gaming performance is 50 percent better than their last major launch, the Geforce 8800 Ultra. Support for three way SLI support is there and there's also support for CUDA technology which the company claims can offload a number of CPU processes over to the GPU.

In addition to the high powered and highly expensive Geforce GTX 280, there's also the less powerful and less pricey Geforce GTX 260 which will be released on June 26 for the suggested price of $399