Graphics card competition has heated up with the introduction of ATI's HD4800 series -- to offer a more attractive solution to go against the ATI cards, NVIDIA has now introduced the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 graphics card. This particular 260 has slightly more stream processors than the 260 which was originally released: it then had 192 stream processors, whereas the Core 216 variant has 216 stream processors; hence the name. And if you are confused over this entire mess of a naming convention, then you are not alone.
The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 will sell for a competitive $280 and will go head-to-head with the HD 4870, both in price and performance. The latter sells for anything between $280 and $300. Check out two such 260 offerings from EVGA and Zotac.
Pricing pressure increased on Nvidia's GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 when ATI tagged their HD 4800 series cards for $300 only. NVIDIA then slashed the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 prices by a hefty amount in response.
Specifications of both cards from EVGA and Zotac are virtually identical. The number of stream processors differs from 192 stream processors in standard GTX 260 card to 216 stream processors as NVIDIA has enabled one more functional block with 24 stream processing units in the existing GT200 GPU. The GT200 GPU can offer a maximum of 240 stream processors -- 24 each in 10 functional blocks. Along with a total of nine such blocks in the GTX 260 Core 216, eight more texture filtering units have also been enabled, bringing the total to 72 texture filtering units.
While the Radeon HD 4870 outpaced the 192-core 260, it will be interesting to see if the 216-core variant can fare better against its arch-rival. Also note that the card still doesn't offer DirectX 10.1 support.
Source: Techtree.com
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