NVIDIA's GeForce GTX series 200 includes both the GeForce GTX 260 and 280, now in several flavors (GTX 295 is in fact two GTX 260 GPUs).

The GTX series 200 GPUs are big, they have roughly 1400 million transistors. It was the biggest chip that NVIDIA has ever built. To compare, the GeForce 8800 only had roughly 700 Million processors. So that's roughly doubling up the previous transistor count. Obviously a big chunk of the transistors are being utilized for the shader cores. And shader cores this product surely has:

• 240 of them on the GeForce GTX 280.
• 216 cores on the GeForce GTX 260 SP216
• 192 cores on the GeForce GTX 260

The increased shader (stream) processor count, should provide a nice boost to the shader compute power, other GPU denominators such as clock speeds remain the same.

The GeForce GTX 260 SP216 SKUs will feature 72 texturing units and 28 ROPs. The updated GPU is technically called G200-103-A2 (the older core was G200-100-A2). The card has a 448-bit (7x64-bit) wide GDDR3 memory bus with 896 MB of framebuffer/memory. It typically comes with 1.0 ns memory chips unless you stumble into OC models from difference board partners. So the extra 24 shader processor cores will give the product a little more bite. Especially in this price-range.

The clock frequencies for the GTX 260 and Core 216 version remain the same, 576MHz on the GPU, and 999MHz for the GDDR3 memory. All that on a 448-bit memory interface. The power for the GTX 260 is fed by two six-pin connectors. Power consumption for this 10.5-inch board is 182W.