GeForce GTX 260 core 216

Written by - on 06 November 2009. Posted in GeForce GT 200 Series

After the release of the Radeon HD 4800 series, AMD has seriously squeezed NVIDIA in the market with its GeForce GTX 280/260 based on the GT200 chip, which is why the latter had to reduce the prices of its top video cards. And if the senior Californian accelerator was out of reach in terms of performance, then the GeForce GTX 260 lost to its competitors in some applications. After some "thinking", NVIDIA released an updated version of the "affordable" hi-end card. After indistinct renaming of old products, NVIDIA finally released a new generation of video cards based on the GT200 in the summer of 2008, 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 introduced an updated GeForce GTX 260 card, reducing prices for a new line of video adapters by this time.

The GT200 GPU consists of ten TPC clusters (Texture Processing Clusters) and eight wide rasterization units (ROPs) capable of outputting four pixels per clock (32 in total). Each cluster has 24 thread processors and eight TMUs each, for a total of 240 stream processors and 80 texture units, but only eight TPC clusters and seven wide ROPs were used for the GeForce GTX 260. Naturally, 192 stream processors, 64 TMUs, and 28 ROPs took a toll on performance. In addition, the GT200 chip supports 512-bit GDDR3 memory access with a total capacity of 1024 MB, but for this video card, the bus has been reduced to 448 bits, and the memory capacity is only 896 MB. Operating frequencies have also been adjusted to decrease: 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 pieces, which gave 216 stream processors and 72 texture units operating at the same 576/1242 MHz. The frequency and memory bus remained unchanged, as did the number of ROPs.

Specifications NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 core 216

Name	GeForce GTX 260 core 216
Core	GT200 (D10U-20)
Process technology (µm)	0.065/0.055
Transistors (million)	1400
Core frequency	576
Memory frequency (DDR)	999
Bus and memory type	GDDR3 448-bit
Bandwidth (Gb/s)	111.89
Unified shader blocks	216
Frequency of unified shader units	1242
TMU per conveyor	72
ROP	28
Shader Model	4.0
Fill Rate (Mpix/s)	16128
Fill Rate (Mtex/s)	41472
DirectX	10
Interface	PCIe 2.0

All in all, the new GTX 260 is brilliant and a great choice for gamers who value great speed for a reasonable price.