I am sure that soon, we'll be able to play Crysis in full graphics glory on our 37-inch LCDs, but that moment has not arrived yet. I don't know why, but I can feel the ATI HD4xxx series will blow NVIDIA away... Anyway, don't take that for granted - it's just my wild guess. Until then, we have two new graphics monsters from NVIDIA, released earlier today - the GTX260 and the GTX280!

While the G80 chip has 128 shader processors and 681 million transistors, the new GT200 comes with no less than 1.4 billion transistors and 192/240(GTX260/GX280) processing units. The interesting part is that these enthusiast-level graphics cards will eat up to 182/236 watts, which is pretty impressive, but wait until we get to the technical specifications!

Oook, here you go: GTX280 - 1296 MHz core, 1107 MHz memory, 1024 MB memory capacity, and 933 GFlops processing power, no less than 80% more than the 8800 GTX (518 GFlops); GTX260 - 1242 MHz core, 999 MHz memory and 896 MB of memory. To make things even more interesting, both the GTX260 and GTX280 support 3-way SLI configurations!

Expected to become available starting June 26 for $399 MSRP(GTX260) and $649(GTX280), the graphics cards integrating these two GPUs will surely deal a blow to the 9800 GX2 and AMD's HD 3870 X2, but that's only true for those looking to get highest performance possible, without looking at the price. "Bang per buck"-wise, there are plenty of better solutions allowing you to play the latest games without problems.