14 DAY TRIAL // It’s been a while since the Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA launched a graphics card that would provide its users with a dual-GPU configuration, straight out of the box. The chip maker, however, does have enough experience in this field, which will allow it to come up with a design that has the potential to become a market success, and basically provide users with a high-performance graphics card.
Since the 9800 GX2, NVIDIA has launched a series of new graphics cards, designed for a wide market segment, ranging from entry-level to high-end in terms of performance. Yet, the most notable release has to be its GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics cards, which are based on the company's GT200 GPU and have been made available back in mid-June. However, the GTX 280 lost the performance crown when AMD launched its Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB, leaving NVIDIA with nothing to compete in the enthusiast market.
Still, NVIDIA is one of the leading chip makers worldwide, which is the reason why the company was expected to come out with a new product that would be capable to challenge AMD's current flagship model. This product is to be known as the GeForce GTX 295, the company's new flagship, which NVIDIA intends to release early in 2009. As it has been said in several of our previous articles, the GTX 295 is basically a dual-GPU graphics card that boasts two 55nm cores, which take advantage of the company's GT200 GPU architecture.
The card is yet to become official, but that hasn't stopped the company from allowing a few, select editors worldwide to get a glimpse of what the card has to offer. The guys over at PC Perspective appear to have been among the lucky ones, as they have recently published a preview of the new card, showing the world everything, from specifications to benchmarks and even some first impressions.
In their own words, the GTX 295 is a “mix between GTX 260 and GTX 280.” You will probably get the same feeling after you take a look at the specifications of the new GTX 295, as posted on the PC Perspective website.
480 Stream processors
576 MHz core clock
1242 MHz shader clock
1000 / 2000 MHz GDDR3 memory clock
1792MB total frame buffer (896MB per core)
4480-bit memory interface per core
56 total ROPs (28 per core)
160 texture units (80 per core)
The test platform included an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, installed on an EVGA nForce 790i Ultra SLI mobo. Also, the test platform boasted 2GB of OCZ's DDR-1333 memory, a 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive, a 1000 Watt power supply, Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit operating system and the NVIDIA Forceware 177.38 Beta and AMD Catalyst HD 4830 Beta video drivers. Also, to compare the results, an AMD HD 4870 X2 2GB and a GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB graphics cards were used on the same platform. As for the included benchmarks, we have to mention Call of Duty: World at War, Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, World in Conflict and 3DMark Vantage.
You can check out the full results on the aforementioned website, but we do have to say that the GTX 295 has successfully risen to the expectations and when it will come out in January it will allow NVIDIA to once again reclaim the top performance spot.
