I’m talking about the newly released nVidia GeForece GTX 200 series. Well, they had to name is something different…they’ve already finished with the 9 series…not smart to make a 10 series.

Well, nVidia touts that this card is different. As usual, it’s much faster than the 8800GT. D’oh…as if we didn’t know and expect that. Honestly, have you ever seen anyone say ‘This card is slower than our previuos generation ones. Come buy it!’. Yeesh…

PCWorld says that this card is twice the performance on Crysis for thrice the price of a 8800GT. Read the article here.

Anyway, they say that (finally), they’re trying to trying to make GPUs GPUs. Hehe. I mean, they’re turning Graphics Processing Units into General Processing Units. Well, this is good, because graphics cards have a lot of potential. You see, when you write software, you write it for the CPU. The compiler compiles it for the CPU. Nobody cares to make applications for GPUs, except game developers. The thing is that GPUs are more complex, and you need to access the hardware through drivers and all kinds of holey-kamoley crap.

So, it was upto the card makers themselves to take care of this. nVidia has released CUDA or Compute Unified Device Architecture for well, redirecting some computation to the GPU. GPUs are great at doing complex math, like vector operations, and massive floating-point calculations.

Also, since nVidia bought out AGEIA, it’s been trying to incorporate it’s line of physics processing units (now you’ll be thinking just how many different types of proccesing units there are!) with the graphics cards. You see, till developers make games with support for PPUs, the PPUs won’t sell. And people won’t buy PPUs till games with PPU support come out. It’s a Catch-22 situation.

So, if nVidia incorporates the PPU with the GPU, and the graphics card ships with both, developers can finally start writing games for PPUs as well. That’d be nice.

Too bad I couldn’t benchmark the new card, because:

  • I don’t have the card – :-(
  • This is not a bloody online magazine. It’s a blog.