NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 Unleashed
Our Summary and Conclusion
Performance Summary: The new GeForce GTX 275 performed exactly as expected in comparison to NVIDIA's other current GTX-series offerings. As its name suggests, the GeForce GTX 275's performance should fall somewhere in between the GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 260, and that is exactly what our benchmark results proved out. In comparison to AMD's newly released ATI Radeon HD 4890, more often than not, the GeForce GTX 275 finishes ahead of the Radeon HD 4890. In Crysis and at higher resolutions in ET:QW, however, the Radeons had a slight edge.
With its MSRP of $249, the new GeForce GTX 275 is an attractive product. At that price, it's a good $60 to $90 less expensive than most GeForce GTX 285 cards, despite offering about 85% to 90% of the performance of NVIDIA's current flagship single-GPU powered card. $249 is also a fair price in light of the latest information we have on AMD's pricing of the ATI Radeon HD 4890, which should fall somewhere in between $229 and $249 for reference cards, depending on the board partner and the availability of mail in rebates.
We're also compelled to mention that the GeForce GTX 275's ultimate value is also enhanced by its support for PhysX and CUDA. Support for DX10.1 remains a nice feather in AMD's cap of course, but NVIDIA has been pushing hard to advance support for PhysX, and it is paying dividends will multiple game developers. NVIDIA is also releasing a new free PhysX pack which showcases many of the PhysX implementations currently on the market or coming soon. A number of applications that take advantage of the GPU courtesy of CUDA are also available or are coming down the pipeline, like MotionDSP's vReveal, Cyberlink PowerDirector 7, Pegasys TMPGEnc 4, and others--some that we can't talk about just yet--that offer significant performance gains over similar applications that use the CPU alone. Support for GeForce 3D Vision is also a plus, if you're intrigued by the possibility of true 3D gaming and have the necessary monitor to exploit the technology.
In the end, we think the GeForce GTX 275 is a solid offering from NVIDIA. If you're in the market for a high-performing graphics card and don't have an unlimited budget, the GeForce GTX 275 has plenty to offer for 250 bucks. Unfortunately, cards may not be widely available in every region for a couple of weeks. NVIDIA expects consumers in some regions to be able to purchase cards today, but it won't be until April 14 that cards become widely available.
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