Yesterday two major providers released their latest Graphic Processing Unit’s (GPUs); Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 200 line and AMD’s FireStream 9250.

The company claim that Nvidia’s 200 series offers PC gamers fifty percent better performance over Nvidia’s previous GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU and 9800 series GPU.

The GPU features parallel and multi-threaded architecture, and is aimed primarily at the series enthusiast, according to Nvidia.

Intended to boost performance for DirectX 10 games, the chips are the first to use Ageia’s PhysX technology. PhysX is a nifty bit of middleware which is designed to allow ‘physical responses’ during gaming, for example a car getting shot by a bullet would respond in the same way as the real world.

The company is also about to unleash its GeForce PhysX technology very soon, according Jason Paul who is the senior product manager at Nvidia.

“Within a couple weeks, we’ll be rolling out our GeForce PhysX driver, which is going to allow the GPU to basically do a PhysX simulation to bring a whole new class of gaming effects on to the processor,” he said

Featuring twice as many transistors as the GeForce 9800 GPU line, the GTX 200 series uses the bulk of its 1.4 billion transistors to perform the necessary mathematical calculations for 3D rendering. The chip uses the 280 million transistors remaining to help boost the number of cores on each processor from 128 to 240 (on the GYX 280) and 192 (on the GTX 260).

This extra power enables GeForce GTX 200 chips to not just enhance graphics and gameplay, but when combined with Nvidia’s Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), allows developers to design high calculation computing applications that run using a GPU.

“One of the things we’re doing beyond gaming is introducing a whole new set of non-graphic applications that are running on the GPU using the compute architecture inside the GTX 200, as well as our CUDA technology,” Paul explained.

For example, Folding@Home is a distributed computation program created at Stanford University that gathers computing power from millions of consumer’s GPUs to perform complex calculations.

Folding@Home and other similar applications run upwards of 140 times faster on the Nvidia processor than on traditional CPUs, Nvidia said.

“This is due to the much more highly parallel and multi-threaded nature of the architecture and the raw floating point processing power available in the architecture,” Paul said.

“The CPU is very good at doing serial instruction intensive operations. Graphics processors are very good at doing data-intensive, highly parallel operations. So, the key here is getting a good mix of graphics processor and CPU on your system to handle all of these applications that really have a combination of serial and parallel operations,” he added.

The GeForce GTX 280 goes on sale June 26th with a price of US$649. The GTX 260, priced at $399, is already available.

Let’s not forget about Nvidia’s rival AMD, and their FireStream 9250. This Processor is designed with a distinctly different architecture to Nvidia chips.

AMD’s latest chip is a stream processor designed to boost critical algorithms in high-performance computing (HPC) as well as more mainstream applications.

FireStream features include 1 GB of Graphics Double Date Rate 3 (GDDR3) memory and include a second-generation double-precision floating point hardware implementation that enables 200 gigafFLOPS, according to AMD.

The compact size GPU is designed for small 1U servers, desktops, workstations and larger servers.

The FireStream 9250 and its supporting SDK (software development kit) goes on sale in the third-quarter of 2008 with a price of $999.