14 DAY TRIAL // After much anticipation and a series of leaked details over the Internet, the Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA has finally introduced its latest GeForce graphics cards, designed to take advantage of a new 55nm process technology. The announcement, which took place at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, brings forth two new graphics cards, the single core GTX 285 and the manufacturer’s latest flagship model, the dual-GPU GTX 295. Both of them have been designed for the high-performance and enthusiast market segment and are already supported by the company’s latest video drivers.
NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285 follows the GTX 280, released back in mid-2008, a card that was designed on a 65nm process technology but which, unfortunately, failed to rise to the performance capabilities of AMD’s Radeon HD 4870 X2, a dual-GPU graphics solution that, up to this moment, has provided the best desktop graphics performance. The GTX 285 enables the green company to claim the world’s most powerful single GPU solution on the market, capable of a 30% performance boost over its competitors. Moreover, NVIDIA went a step further and upped the ante with the release of the dual-GPU GTX 295, which is claimed to be the world’s fastest dual-GPU solution.
When talking about the GTX 285, you should be ready to embrace its 240 processor cores, clocked at 1476MHz. Its GPU core has been factory-set to 648MHz, while the memory clock is rated at 1242MHz. The card is capable of providing a texture fill rate of 51.8 billion/sec, with 1GB of GDDR3 512-bit memory. Additionally, NVIDIA’s new single-GPU king comes with support for the company’s 2-way and 3-way SLI technology, PhysX and CUDA. The GTX 285 will offer DirectX 10 and OpenGL 2.1 support and can cope with a maximum digital resolution of 2560 by 1600.
The specifications on the dual-GPU GTX 295 are somewhat double those on the GTX 285. The card is equipped with 480 GPUs, 240 per graphics processor. The core/memory/shader clocks have been set to 576MHz/999MHz/1242MHz, respectively. The card is equipped with 1792 MB of GGDR3 memory, with 896MB per GPU, while the memory interface is rated at 896-bit.
Both cards require a high-performance power supply unit with the minimum system power requirement rated at 550W, for the GTX 285 model, whereas the GTX 295 will need a system that is equipped with at least a 680W PSU. As for pricing and availability, NVIDIA announced that the GTX 295 is already available for purchase from leading add-in-card makers with an MSRP of $499. The GTX 285 will become available on January 15th with an MSRP of $399.
