Chip firm Nvidia claimed its GTX200 graphics chip family will support 240 multithreaded processor cores and will convert high quality video much faster than the latest microprocessors.

By which we think it's having a dig at Intel, and along the way AMD.

The GTX280 will also support three way Nvidia SLI tech, said Nvidia, and because of its general purpose parallel processing modes, the chip family will create 'ultra realistic' games, by which we suppose the firm means games that are more realistic than before. The company pulled in an associate professor of chemistry at Santford to say the graphics chips deliver the biggest boost to processing power in the history of folding@home. Vijay Pande, the boffin at Stanford, claimed it ran folding@home 45 times faster than the most recent 3GHz Core 2 quad processor from Intel.

Graphics cards using the family will be available this week, with suggested pricing for GTX280 and GTX250 being $650 and $400, respectively. X