NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260

The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 is NVIDIA's mid-range graphics card. It would give a good indication of the effect GPU acceleration of PhysX has on the actual frame rate for the average NVIDIA graphics card.

Although the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 is significantly slower than the GeForce GTX 280, it still delivered a remarkable boost in frame rate - 42.5 fps at 1280 x 1024. This goes to show just how much spare processing power there is, even in a mid-range card.

Tt 1920 x 1200, it was still capable of delivering a frame rate of 29 fps. That is over 2.3x faster than what the super-fast Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition processor is capable of.

CPU Vs. GPU Performance Summary

This summarizes the performance scaling seen when physics calculation is offloaded from Intel's fastest processor to the three NVIDIA graphics card.

Although NVIDIA claimed that the GeForce GTX 280 would deliver 15x more physics calculations than an Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 processor, that was only if the GeForce GTX 280 was dedicated entirely to accelerating PhysX calculations. In a real world scenario of a gamer using a single card, the effect is not so startling, even if it is still quite remarkable. This is because the graphics card also has to process vertices and apply textures, amongst other things.

On average, the GeForce GTX 280 was about 3.26x faster than the Core i7-965 processor at physics calculations. The dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295 was about 26% faster. Compared to the Core i7-965, it was 4.1x faster. The mid-range GeForce GTX 260 was 16% slower than the GeForce GTX 280 but even so, it was about 2.73x faster than the Core i7-965.

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