Conclusions

If there's one thing that anyone who has been following the 3D graphics industry will have learned over the years, it's "Never write off NVIDIA".  Earlier this year, it was hard to see how the graphics giant would be able to turn things around in the short-term, being beaten out at various price and performance thresholds and with little left in reserve to make a comeback beyond unique selling points such as CUDA and PhysX, which are still yet to take off to quite a large enough extent to make their GPUs a must-buy.

Yet turns things around NVIDIA (to some extent) have, thanks to a three-pronged approach that has involved some hefty price cuts, the introduction of the new GeForce GTX 260 revision we've seen on show today with 216 Stream Processors available to it, and new drivers with some impressive performance improvements to boot.  This triumvirate of changes has now pushed the reference clocked GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 to the point where it can breathe down the neck of the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, giving it a run for its money and even beating it out quite frequently, all at a similar price point.  Of course, it still lacks a full DirectX 10.1 implementation, but then again PhysX raises its head in an attempt to being people back on board the good ship NVIDIA.  Which is the more important and/or useful at this point in time is an argument that could rage for weeks (although off-hand I'd give DirectX 10.1 a very slight edge at this point in time).

Of course, you can always rely on XFX to look at NVIDIA's reference clocks for any given SKU, laugh in their general direction, scrap those clock speeds and go with something much, much faster while still employing the reference cooling solution.  This is exactly what's happened here via the GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition, which employs some decent clock speed increases to both core and memory to put it some way above both a reference GeForce GTX 260 and (more often than not) AMD's Radeon HD 4870 1GB.

Of course, these improvements don't come for free, with the increase in retail price putting the board above the average GeForce GTX 260, but if you're looking for as much performance as you can muster without going all the way up to the GeForce GTX 280 (or even the Radeon HD 4870 X2 beyond that), then XFX's Black Edition part has it in spades.  Put simply, it's a cut above reference GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 1GB parts, and if you have the cash to spare you'll love that extra injection of performance.

Product information

XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition

- Vendor web site
- Vendor product information

Recommended retail pricing and availability (at time of going to press):

Dabs - £252.98

Many thanks to XFX for providing the sample for this review

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