jmke

The Radeon HD 4890 release meant that Nvidia would not be able to have a rest. The new product from the opposing camp proved to be so good that it could challenge the single-GPU flagship of the GeForce series while coming at a lower recommended price. Reducing the price of the GeForce GTX 285 even lower would not make sense even from a technical standpoint. The 512-bit memory bus prevented the G200/G200b-based products from switching to a simpler and cheaper PCB.

The solution is obvious if you recall the GeForce GTX 260 that was made by cutting down the GeForce GTX 280 and later reincarnated as GeForce GTX 260 Core 216. The main difference of that card was that it did not use the full width of the memory bus. Early models of GeForce GTX 260 were based on the full-featured PCB from GeForce GTX 280 but came with 14 instead of 16 memory chips, but later on the card acquired a new PCB design with a 448-bit bus instead of a 512-bit one.

Nvidia already had such a product at the moment the Radeon HD 4890 was announced but it could not match ATI’s new solution in terms of speed. The only opportunity was to increase the number of active shader and texture processors and Nvidia did that. That’s the background behind the release of the GeForce GTX 275 which, by Nvidia’s plans, is going to fill in the empty niche between the GeForce GTX 285 and GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 and to compete with the Radeon HD 4890 in both performance and price.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...-gtx275oc.html

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