NVIDIA’s GTX 295 Looks Promising

As we found out last week, both ATI and NVIDIA currently offer mid-range cards that are pretty equal in performance, but things change when talking about high-end. Since ATI first released their HD 4870 X2 dual-GPU card this past August, they’ve rightfully held the crown for the fastest card on the planet, which we talked more about in in our review. But, NVIDIA wants the world to know that it won’t be much longer before they regain that crown, with the help of their GTX 295.

This card follows upon the general design of the 7950 GX2 and 9800 GX2 in that it’s essentially two graphics cards combined to share the same dual-slot form-factor. The GTX 295 is no different, and in most regards, it’s almost like putting a GTX 260 and 280 together. The upcoming card features the stream processors of the GTX 280, at 240 SP, and the clocks of the GTX 260, of 576MHz Core.

Ryan at PC Perspective took the card for a spin, and for the most part, the findings aren’t that surprising. Generally speaking, like the HD 4870 X2, it excels more at higher resolutions (especially 2560×1600), and when compared to the previously-mentioned card, it’s without question the better performer. Things will come down to pricing, though, but from how things look right now, the GTX 295 might well-deserve its price premium. Stay tuned for our full review of the new card upon it’s release next month.

What is interesting about these specs is the mix between GTX 260 and GTX 280 heritage. The 480 stream processors indicate that the GTX 295 is basically a pair of GTX 280 GPUs (since the GTX 260s have either 192 SPs or 216 SPs depending on your place in time) on a single board while the clock rates are exactly like those reference clocks on the GTX 260 GPU. Also, the 448-bit memory bus and 896MB of memory per core are also indicative of the GTX 260 product.