NVIDIA has officially announced that the new generation of video cards from the company is spearheaded by the release of GeForce GTX 280 and the GTX 260. As variants of the GTX 200 line, both cards boast improvements over NVIDIA's G80-spec architecture to create a high-powered computing entity.

It's so high powered, in fact, that NVIDIA has claimed that the GTX 200 processors alone beat the best Intel could ever offer, and even run circles around the PlayStation 3's powerful CELL processor that brought the project to success. Vijay Pande, Associate Processor of Chemistry at Stanford University even agreed with NVIDIA's remarks, saying that:

GeForce GPUs will soon deliver the biggest boost in processing power we’ve seen in the history of Folding@Home. The GeForce GTX 280 GPU runs Folding@Home 45 times faster than the latest 3GHz Core2 Quad CPU. If just one percent of the world’s GeForce 8- and 9-Series GPUs ran Folding@Home, we would have 70 petaflops of processing power to help find cures for disease.

Professor Pande even estimates that the computing output of that one percent of CUDA capable cards held 10 times more power than the top 100 supercomputers in the world - and combined. But how does the GTX 280 and GTX 260 do as video graphics cards?

Tom's Hardware believes that it's a highly recommended buy for the hardware enthusiasts and extreme gamers, but as results show, it's only gradually better than a 9800 GX2. In some aspects, it's even bested by ATI's Radeon 3870 GX2, which led most to believe that it might not stand up against AMD's almost mythical 4780 GX2 that's rumored to best the whatever NVIDIA could throw at it. More on the bleeding edge of computing technology as we get them.