ASUS ENGTX260 HTDP 896M A Video Card Review :: Features

• GeForce GT200 chip
• 1.4 Billion transistors
• 448-bit memory interface
• 65 nanometer process
• 576MHz core clock
• 1998MHz memory clock
• 1242 Shader clock
• DirectX 10.0
• Pixel Shader 4.0
• Vertex Shader 4.0
• PhysX
• CUDA
• OpenGL 3.0

The ASUS card uses NVIDIA's GeForce GT200 chip which is based upon TSMC's 65 nanometer process and has 1.4 Billion transistors. The chip used in the card is not the GT200b chip found on the new GTX285 or GTX295 cards, but is identical to the GTX280. The main difference between the GTX280 and GTX260 216 cards is the number of SPs (Stream Processors) with the GTX280 having 240 and the GTX260 216 having 216 Stream Processors.

The ASUS card is clocked at the reference clock speeds for the GTX260, 576MHz for the Core, 1998MHz for the memory and 1242MHz for the Shader clock. The chip has 28 ROPs (Outputted Pixels), and a fill rate of 16.1 Gigapixels and a texel fillrate of 36.9 Gigatexels. The memory interface on the card is 448-bit giving a total memory bandwidth of 111.9GB/second. There is 896MB of GDDR3 memory on the card, the same as found on the 192 SP card.

NVIDIA first introduced support for DirectX 10.0 with their GeForce 8800GTX in 2006. Microsoft released Windows Vista in early 2007 with support for DirectX 10.0 features including Unified Pixel and Vertex Shaders, Geometry Shaders, and more. ATI and S3 have moved onto the next iteration of DirectX, DirectX 10.1, but NVIDIA is still on the former. In any event, by the time games will require DirectX 10.1, it is likely we will have moved onto DirectX 11 hardware.

PhysX is the hardware and software game physics engine developed by a company called Ageia before it was bought by NVIDIA in 2008. The PhysX game engine is multi-platform and is a main feature of the game Mirror's Edge for the PC. PhysX effects include physically simulated smoke, glass, banners and more. Hardware game physics can have a real interaction with the player's action, shooting a chandelier may cause fragments to fall dropping on enemy soldiers hurting them, or shooting a banner may cause a character to get tangled up making the character slow down.

SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface, NVIDIA's version of the multi-GPU solution. NVIDIA first introduced SLI in 2004 with the release of the nForce 4 and has spread through the use of the nForce 590, nForce 570, nForce 680, nForce 650, nForce 780, 790,750i and Intel's X58 and Skulltrail platforms. The GeForce GTX260 can be SLI configured with two other GTX 260 video cards to provide performance that's nearly 2.5 that of a single card. PhysX can also be enabled with SLI video cards by dedicating one card to PhysX calculations. In applications that work with PhysX, it can provide an order of magnitude increase in performance.