That said, making a compute heavy ASIC with 1.4 billion transistors is an amazing feat, but to be honest I had hoped to see more performance from such a big chip – the GT200's performance is often higher than the 9800 GX2 in the targeted tests we've run, but in many real-world cases it isn't, as we'll show you very soon in our GeForce GTX 280 and 260 gaming performance article.

I can't help but feel this is a strange position to be in with the release of a completely new architecture because, generally speaking, the new generation of hardware completely outclasses everything that's gone before. That isn't the case here and I get the feeling that Nvidia has been a little conservative on the graphics front. Instead, it has focused a lot of resources on improving the GPU's general compute capabilities.

What concerns me though is that Nvidia seems intent on pushing CUDA at the moment, which is fine in many respects, but it's not the only player in the GPU computing market and applications developed using CUDA don't work on other hardware. That limits its appeal to me, unfortunately, as we dearly need a standard that all hardware vendors support in hardware.