NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 review [Guru3D.com]

[Guru3D News]

NVIDIA today unleashes their high-end GeForce GTX 275 graphics card. Tagged with sheer dedication to compete against the all new Radeon HD 4890 and a really radian price tag of 239 EUR does the GTX...

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[chispy]

Woow great review Hilbert , the cat and mouse game of nvidia and ATI will highly benefit us the consumers. Awsome price tag for so much power.
Long live PC Gaming and yes , drop the darn gaming consoles people .

[Cybermancer]

I can only agree with that, chispy.

249 USD (or 239 EUR) is a very nice price and it fits the expected price spot just perfectly.

Nice explanation of Ambient Occlusion in the article, btw!

After reading the article, I somehow don't like my GTX260s anymore.

Originally Posted by Guru3D News

Dump the darn consoles, power to PC gaming!

+ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

[Aura89]

Personally i think you should have combined these two articles (GTX 275 and 4890) that way it would have been a lit easier to combine the results all into the same table, it'd be easy to see the difference of a GTX 275 to a 4870 and 4890 aswell as GTX 260 and also see the difference between the 4890 and 4870 comparatively all in one place, instead we have to go between pages

But other then that, great reviews!

Originally Posted by Cybermancer

After reading the article, I somehow don't like my GTX260s anymore.

Yeah, me too, and i JUST got this card

[Cybermancer]

At least you got the SP 216 version.

[ScoobyDooby]

if I were to get some extra cashmoney kickin around this would be my next card for sure.
Great review as per the usual Hilbert!

I still feel like the 8800gtx is letting me hang in there, but soon enough its power will seem not so mighty

[getsuga12]

aww... dammit, now I'm caught between a quad-core upgrade and this for the year.

[cowie]

this card might not clock 1g but it is still a great clocker 800+ should be easy with volts.

nv may have won the price per performance between the 275 and 4890.
i know we all won with these two.

[GabrielSans]

Great article, Hilbert, as always.

While I accept that all this spree is for the good of us all, I'd really like AMD and Nvidia to realease HD5000 and 300 series once and for all. The amount of confusing specs is already intolerable. While people like us, hardcore gamers, can do the calculations to find the final bandwidth of every card, for example, I don't think that the rest of people will fully understand the differences between a GTX280 and GTX 275 except that the die of the latter is smaller, etc.

In my humble opinion, the moronic thing is not mainly to keep releasing cards after cards that are only small modifications of the same card in the end (yes, this is irritating but possibly necessary for prices to go down) but the nomenclature. Most people look at this, unfortunately. And I don't see much point in building another card with higher clocks in core, memory and shaders than GTX 280 but with less memory and bits in the memory interface except obssession. This is absolutely confusing for any mind but the one of a hardcore gamer taking the trouble of reading detailed articles like the Hilbert's.

Hopefully, AMD won't release something like Radeon HD 4895 or Nvidia will counterattack with maybe... GTX 277. We need the new architectures as soon as possible to finish this crazy nomenclature spree once and for all!

[Tyler Dalton]

My eVGA step-up window ended 2 days ago...FML. Oh well, I don't think I could have done without a card for 1-2 weeks during the step-up process.

[applejack]

A new feature introduced : Ambient Occlusion

New in driver revision 185 and upwards is Ambient occlusion. Some of you might have already spotted it in recent beta drivers. Mind you, this features is available on all GeForce series 8 graphics cards and higher, not just the GTX 200 series.

this is old news for a leaked alpha driver. why would you dedicate a full page for it in a gtx275 review ? not even one benchmark

[GabrielSans]

Additional problems with the Nvidia policy is what I call: "to be proud" and "I bought rightly" gaps.

For example, I bought my Radeon HD 4870 in July 2008. It was a high-end single-gpu videocard and continued to do so till now with the arrival of Radeon HD 4890, which is a decent jump in performance to justify a new purchase. So, I could "be proud" of my high-end single-gpu videocard for about 8 months!! I don't take into account the 1 GB model, because I play in low res and with not much antialias.

This doesn't happen with Nvidia, where you bought, for example, a GTX 280 by the time when the Radeon HD 4870 was released, but you got two more improvements (GTX 285, and GTX 275 now... though I am not still sure if GTX 275 is better or not than GTX 280). A better example is the GTX 260 that was absurdly updated to GTX 260 SP216 (just naming this card makes me sick!). Let alone if you were the sad buyer of a 9800 videocard, which has had its last rebranding some weeks ago. All this policy by Nvidia, in their obsessive running after AMD, reduces the "to be proud" gap for the buyers.

The second problem has to do with the "I bought rightly" gap. When you buy a Nvidia videocard, sooner than later, you realize that your purchase was not right because the guys released a new one that will give you 3 more frames per second than the one you have now. This is extremely frustrating and disappointing, specially for people who don't live in rich countries, and need to almost break the bank to acquire a new videocard.

For those reasons, and not because of the performance, I think I won't buy a Nvidia product till the company stops its "AMD syndrome", i.e. till they stop releasing/rebranding cards that are only tweaked old models.

In their crazy race to overcome AMD, Nvidia has forgot the buyers completely. I was a Nvidia fan before, but no more. In fact, as the current Nvidia's course of action looks so mad to me, my next motherboard won't be a Nforce and I will continue to buy Radeons.

And of course, regarding the multi-gpu solution by Nvidia, if you check the moronic GTX 295 set up, you'll see that it looks like 2 GTX 280 in SLI when it comes to number of shader processors, except for the memory interface that is 448 bits per core, i.e. the same one as in the GTX 260. So, GTX 295 is like a hybdrid between two GTX 280 and two GTX 260. Why didn't they implement a 512 bits bus and that's it? Because it was very expensive maybe. Anyway, all these specs look so crazy that I don't know what to think about that company.

Pitiful because I bought Nvidia products for so many years.

[applejack]

^ another "proud" (aka frustrated) ati fanboy.

I buy X because X is good, I would never buy Y just because X+ and X++ are available later on, while Y stays Y or even becomes Y- with broken drivers.

[cowie]

oh gabs then you brought your 4870 for 300$ when now they have a faster card for 250?
you still ok with that?
nvdia has to place cards where ati has thier cards at the same price point.
if you feel the 4890 is worth the upgrade so be it some do not,as some dont feel a 275 is a worthy upgrade from a 260 216.

its a dog eat dog type of bizness one cant let the other get too many sales without trying to respond somehow.
BTW why talk crap about the 295 anyways?
whats wrong with the fasteast card on the planet?

[GabrielSans]

Originally Posted by applejack

^ another "proud" (aka frustrated) ati fanboy.

I buy X because X is good, I would never buy Y just because X+ and X++ are available later on, while Y stays Y or even becomes Y- with broken drivers.

No ATI fanboy. Maybe an AMD ATI fan.

Anyway, I will be a fan of AMD ATI till they become crazy like Nvidia in the future. Craziness seem to be a cyclic process. I was a 3dfx fan, next a Nvidia fan and now an AMD ATI fan. Who'll be next?, I wonder.

[GabrielSans]

Originally Posted by cowie

oh gabs then you brought your 4870 for 300$ when now they have a faster card for 250?
you still ok with that?
nvdia has to place cards where ati has thier cards at the same price point.
if you feel the 4890 is worth the upgrade so be it some do not,as some dont feel a 275 is a worthy upgrade from a 260 216.

its a dog eat dog type of bizness one cant let the other get too many sales without trying to respond somehow.
BTW why talk crap about the 295 anyways?
whats wrong with the fasteast card on the planet?

Sorry, but the AMD ATI policies in regard to releasing videocards and nomenclature look much more consistent to me than the Nvidia's. While AMD ATI keeps that coherence, I will keep buying their cards.

And another thing you possibly don't know, it is the fact that in countries like mine, in general the cost of the Nvidia cards is always much higher than that of Radeon's. For example, a 9800 GX2 is 2x more expensive than a Radeon HD 4870. And that is much money here.

[Hilbert Hagedoorn]

Guys ... behave .. behave ..

[cowie]

ok gabs you have your opinoins and i cant agrue with that

[GabrielSans]

I am not angry, friends, just pointing out some things about Nvidia. The last specs of GTX 275 really drove me mad! One company should be serious. To build crazy hybrids making people every day more confused only to compete with another company is not a serious behavior despite the price cuts. The performance increase is not so impressive to justify that. Not to mention to rebrand cards as Nvidia did. This is not a serious behavior. Nvidia should "behave" then.

[snip3r_3]

Originally Posted by GabrielSans

I am not angry, friends, just pointing out some things about Nvidia. The last specs of GTX 275 really drove me mad! One company should be serious. To build crazy hybrids making people every day more confused only to compete with another company is not a serious behavior despite the price cuts. The performance increase is not so impressive to justify that. Not to mention to rebrand cards as Nvidia did. This is not a serious behavior. Nvidia should "behave" then.

Theres no flaw in Nvidia's naming structure from my POV (other than the 8800/9800 naming).

GTS240<250<GTX260<260 C216<275<285<295
same as
HD4650<4670<4830<4850<4870<4890<4850X2<4870X2
to me.

The 260 to 275 step is a noticeable one, just like the 4870 to 4890 is as well.
The 275 to 285 step is still there as well, though the latter would require a price adjustment now probably.

The performance steps up as the numbers go up. The GTX275 is a great card at a great price, and so is the 4890. However, since the 275 is slightly faster and slightly cheaper. Both have nearly identical power consumption (AMD has higher idle, but lower load), and nearly identical temperatures off the stock heatsink (though AMD is a tad louder). Thus the advantage is slightly in favor of nvidia in this round of the refresh.

The "proudness" factor, depends on the person. Wanting to have that feeling for a long time is of course impossible, as technology improves at blistering speeds. I understand what you mean. Well, I had this feeling when I built my first computer a while back =] Then I gave up after new thing kept coming out. Who doesn't want their items to be the best? Who likes to lose? Nobody. Just like I would like my car to always be the latest model, that would never happen (well my parents' cars that I ride on ) There is no "rule" stating companies can't release new products whenever they want to, theres no warranty that what you buy won't be outdated for at least half a year or something. To the company, if competition is tough, they will react to it for their own benefit. To stay on top of everything all the time requires a big wallet.

Instead, why don't people just enjoy their items instead of worrying about whether or not it will be outdated soon (which is just a matter of sooner or later)? If one keeps that feeling constantly, life would be quite full of disappointment and resentment. I think many people, like some of my friends/some family members, are proper examples of what I just said. They spend way too much money keeping up with the latest cell phones (some guy I know has countless Sony ******** phones, K800, K810 <- essentially the same phone, W9XX a slide phone,W960 touch screen one?,W980 the flip one?, and so on, lost track of the numbers), ipods (one friend has every single generation of the Ipod Video/nano/shuffle), ***** (probably more of an obsession, another friend has like 12 pairs of Air Force, all different colors). Random, and probably bad examples, but obsession can be terrible, thats my point.

I just can't really reply what I want to say in words, some things (phrases) in Chinese just can't be translated properly without sounding weird and probably incomprehensible.


After reading the review, it makes me feel bad for buying the GTX285 haha, should have waited for 1 more month, to save a bit, or actually alot on cash ^^ Seems like this is one of the best price-performance card right now.

I wonder if it would be possible though, for future review to have charts comparing the power usage/temperatures/noise levels part, as I had to open a few tabs to compared different cards. The rest of the review is great, but I find this part of reviews a bit frustrating as there are no comparisons

edit: added the weird paragraph about keeping up with stuff

edit 2 : to sava below

Next generation card would probably be released later this year, or maybe early next. They probably want to gain more profit from the R&D they spent on this generation. Also with the poor economy, a new generation of cards won't make too much sense right now as most consumers would still buy the cheaper products (some probably not buying at all). Thus doubling performance would only please the top enthusiast market, which they don't make much money off from. And, it would be stupid for them to kill off the GT200/RV700 series' profitability, as they still sell well right now.


I think I had too much coffee this afternoon, or I'm probably just procrastinating my homework, forums are more fun.

[sava700]

nice review..but what in the hell is going on here?? GTX 275??? why not make a card and focus on it that will be Double the performance than the current flag ship card.


I want to see them jump a little instead of crawling backwards.

[Apocalypse~]

I dont understand onething. What happened to GTX280? Will the 275 beat the 280?... I havent found any review with GTX280 and 275... only GTX285 and GTX260.

[Hilbert Hagedoorn]

Originally Posted by Apocalypse~

I dont understand onething. What happened to GTX280? Will the 275 beat the 280?... I havent found any review with GTX280 and 275... only GTX285 and GTX260.

Good question, they can be considered equal performance wise.

[snip3r_3]

Originally Posted by Apocalypse~

I dont understand onething. What happened to GTX280? Will the 275 beat the 280?... I havent found any review with GTX280 and 275... only GTX285 and GTX260.

From what I've seen, the 285 is just a tiny bit faster than the 280. Stock 280 would be most likely a tiny bit faster than the 275.

Just a guess, but probably is like that, considering the game benchmarks between the 280-285 show little improvement.

[MAD-OGRE]

From all the stuff im seeing, best bet is get whats the cheapest.