A source from www.overclockers.co.uk – one of the UK’s largest hardware resellers - has revealed to Total PC Gaming that sales of nVIDIA’s new 280 and 260 GTX cards are much slower than normally expected for a new GeForce release. The Radeon 4800 series is being cited as the cause for this, as ATi’s latest cards perform similarly but are significantly cheaper. We will be looking at both of manufacturer’s latest and greatest offerings in our supertest the next issue which will be on sale 7th August.

Last week saw the release of the monolithic GeForce GTX 280, which at well over £400 will only be an option for the richest of PC gamers. Fortunately, benchmark numbers for ATi’s latest card have also started trickling onto the internet, and it’s very good news for mainstream PC buyers. Performance generally seems to be higher than the already-speedy GeForce 9800 GTX, but as the new card is available from just £135, it’s currently a lot cheaper. Performance has also been greatly improved in games such as Crysis where nVIDIA previously had a stranglehold.

NVIDIA’s latest graphics card, the GTX 280, goes on sale today. The GTX 280 is, to date, the fastest consumer card from NVIDIA, outperforming its current top-end model the 9800 GX2. Its got a 602MHz core clock, 1GB of GDDR3 memory at 2.2GHz and 1296MHz shader clock. A quick search of various online stores shows prices starting at £429 and going up to over £500 for factory-overclocked models. If that’s a little too rich for you, the GTX 260 will be available from 26th June. It has a slower core, memory and shader clock speeds and 896MB RAM instead of 1GB, but can be found for around £300. There are reviews at AnandTech, Tom’s Hardware, Ubergizmo and many other sites, and we’ll be taking a close look at the card in issue 9, on sale 10th July.