Today, NVIDIA is a multibillion dollar a year company with over 5000 employees. They have branched out from the early days into the chipset business (nForce), mobile graphics business (Tegra), Notebook (Geforce M), Server (Quadro) and other markets far outreaching their humble beginnings in 1995 when their NV1 chip failed due to the release of DirectX. Their focus has never been more sharp as today.

NVIDIA has basically rested on its laurels with the launch of their GeForce 8800GTX series from 2 years ago. The 8800GTX was the first DirectX 10.0 video card to hit the market, with a successful range of cards including the 8800GTS, the 8800 Ultra and variants. The 8800GTX and the Ultra nomenclature cards were the king of the hill until the release of the 9800GTX and 9800GX2 cards from NVIDIA. ATI’s offerings did not offer higher performance until the HD3870X2 was released. NVIDIA is launching two new video cards today, the GTX280 and the GTX260. These represent their second generation Unified Shader Architecture and have many improvements. Their focus moves away from strictly gaming with this new architecture moving to Physics, General Purpose Computing and trans-coding.