Gigabyte GeForce GTX275 GV-N275UD-896H Review :: Features

• GT200b core
• 55 nanometers
• 240 SPs
• 1400 million transistors
• 470mm 2 die size
• PCI Express 2.0
• 896MB GDDR3 memory
• 80 Texture units
• 28 ROPs
• 633MHz core
• 1134MHz memory
• 1404MHz Shader clock
• 127GB/second memory bandwidth
• DirectX 10.0
• Pixel Shader 4.0
• Vertex Shader 4.0
• 2nd generation Unified Shader Architecture
• 448-bit memory interface
• 1010.88 GFLOPS
• TDP 219W
• SLI
• RoHS
• OpenGL 2.1
• HDCP
• PureVideo
• PhysX
• CUDA

The GTX 275 is based upon TSMC's 55 nanometer process and has 1.4 Billion transistors. The move from 65 nanometer to 55 nanometer reduced the die size from 576mm2 to 470mm2 and reduced power usage from the GTX280 from 236W to 216W. Strangely the power consumption on the GTX275 is more than on the GTX285 which has more ROPs, a higher memory bandwidth and higher clock speeds.

The GTX 275 has the same number of Stream Processors as the GTX280, 240 to be exact. The number of texture units is 80 and the number of ROPs (Outputted pixels) is 28. This compares to 240:80:32 on the GTX285/280, 216/80/28 on the GTX 260 216 core, 192/72/28 on the GTX 260 original card. The memory controller on the GTX 275 is a 448-bit memory controller. With a memory speed of 2268MHz this offers 127GB/second of memory bandwidth.

The major push by NVIDIA right now is PhysX support by their graphics cards only. Games like Mirror's Edge, Unreal Tournament 3, Cryostasis and others are using PhysX to simulate real physics in a game like smoke, fog, destructible environments, wind and more. PhysX will be coming to other games as we move further into 2009 and into 2009. You can of course run PhysX effects on the CPU but that would take a lot of CPU cycles meaning that it would be a sideshow.

The GeForce GTX275 supports all of the DirectX 10.0 features including Pixel Shader 4.0, Vertex Shader 4.0, the Geometry Shaders and more. Games like Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, and many others use DirectX 10.0 to bring unparalleled levels of realism with beautiful graphics and good performance that DirectX 9.0c games just can't match. ATI released DirectX 10.1 supporting cards in 2007 with the release of the HD 3800 series, but few games use these effects to date.

Gigabyte is touting the GV-N275UD-896H card as having the Ultra Durable VGA features. The PCB is made with 2 oz of Copper, allowing the card to operate at lower temperatures, higher clock speeds and higher overclocking expandability. They claim 5-10% lower GPU temperatures, 10-30% power switching loss and 10-30% overclocking capability. They use Japanese Solid capacitors on the card, along with Lower RDS (on) MOSFETs and a Ferrite core.