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It seems like we were just getting used to NVIDIA's ninth generation of GeForce, and now, lo and behold, another generation has arrived. This new breed brings a few new changes, and one of these changes is in nomenclature: NVIDIA's suffixes have now become prefixes, and a zero has been dropped. The GTX 280 is the name of the new flagship video card offered by NVIDIA, and today, we'll put it through its paces and see how it compares to nine other video cards, including the now dethroned 9800 GTX.

Before getting to this new generation, lets do a quick recapitulation of NVIDIA's ninth generation. Don't worry, this will be short -- really short, because the 9000 series has only been around since February.

Bucking the usual methodology, NVIDIA kicked off the ninth series with a performance-class card, the 9600 GT. The 9600GT was released primarily to compete against ATI's HD3850, which was selling for around between $140 and $180. While 9600GT had only 64 stream processors (which, by the way, have also had a name-change, and will henceforth be called processing cores) the card proved fast enough to take on the HD3850.

Next out for the nine series, came the 9800GX2. This dual-GPU, two PCB video card was very large, and as fast as it was big. In many ways, the 9800GX2 was a 8800GTS 512MB sandwich; and while it suffered some drawbacks, in most cases, the 9800GX2 offered the fastest performance you could possibly get from a single video card.

Then the 9800GTX was released. When it came down to performance, the 9800GTX did little to separate itself from the 8800GTX -- in fact, the 8800GTX actually out-performed the 9800GTX in some games, at very high resolutions, due to its superior 384-bit memory interface. While this fact did not impress many people, the 9800GTX nonetheless offered a good level of performance for a fair price -- it initially retailed for about half of what the 8800GTX first went for.

Very recently, in what will perhaps be the second last entry to the short-lived, desktop line of NVIDIA's ninth, came the 9600GSO. The 9600GSO was not exactly new however -- in every respect besides the name, a reincarnated 8800GS. While not as fast as the 8800GT, the 9600GSO only helped the good situation PC gamers find themselves in today: between $100 and $200, there has hardly even been a better time to looking to upgrade. For sale right now, there is a multitudinous wealth of fast, affordable video cards at your local hardware store. 

Rumors and product snapshots coming out of Computex in Taipei point towards a 9800GT on the horizon -- which in many ways, looks similar to the 8800GT. In a sense, the 9800GT could be a fitting last release in what was NVIDIA's first series released which did not feature an entirely new design of the GPU core.

That's the highlights of the NVIDIA's ninth series -- and now, it's time to get on to the next.

May look similar to some other cards -- but rest assured, this is a new generation.