Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 review

ATI has provided some staunch competition on the 3D-card front over the past six months or so, but, with the dual-chip GeForce GTX 295, Nvidia has raced back to the top of the performance pile.

At around £420, the GTX 295 is aimed at serious PC gamers, but it also provides the best value among high-end boards. This card requires a beefy PC to run it as a result of significant power demands but, for anyone with the financial and electrical wherewithal to put the GTX 295 to work, you'll enjoy the best 3D hardware currently on offer.

Like its primary competition, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, the GTX 295 uses the familiar two-chips, one-card model we've seen from both Nvidia and ATI in the past. The 4870 X2 has been a popular component in a number of recent high-end gaming PCs, and, with support for multiple graphics chips and graphics cards so prevalent in PCs these days, these dual-chip cards provide gamers with a relatively easy way to set up a quad-GPU configuration.

Crysis (Assault Harbor, DirectX 10, 64-bit, very high, 8x AA)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

1,400 x 960

1,680 x 1,050

1,920 x 1,080

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

40 

34 

29 

Asus EAH 4870 X2

32 

28 

26 

Far Cry 2 (Ranch medium, DirectX 10, very high)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

1,440 x 900

1,680 x 1050

1,920 x 1200

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

87 

76 

62 

Asus EAH 4870 X2

76 

63 

53 

Left 4 Dead (DirectX 9, 8x AA, 16x AF, very high)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)

1,440 x 900

1,680 x 1050

1,920 x 1200

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

161 

154 

141 

Asus EAH 4870 X2

162 

148 

133 

The popularity of ATI's card has to do with the fact that it outperformed Nvidia's previous high-end behemoth, the single-chip GeForce GTX 280, and also cost less. The GTX 295 closes both of those gaps, and also offers some noticeable power-consumption savings.

Comparing the speed and specs of the GTX 295 and 4870 X2, it might, at first glance, seem that the Radeon has the engineering advantage over the Nvidia card. Nvidia uses slower, older RAM and less of it (1792MB of 2.0GHz DDR3, compared to the 4870 X2's 2GB of 3.66GHz DDR5). Both its core clock speed (576MHz compared to 750MHz) and the number of stream processors -- the processing pipelines on the chip that handle various kinds of data requests simultaneously -- (240 compared to 800) are lower as well. We suspect that the Nvidia card benefits from two less obvious advantages that help its performance.

One is the manufacturing process. The GTX 295 uses two 55nm (nanometre) GTX 200 graphics chips, and cramming two of the older 65nm GTX 200 chips onto one card would have been a power-consumption nightmare. We also have no information from ATI on the speed of its stream processors. Our suspicion is that they're significantly slower than the 1.24GHz stream clock on each chip in the GTX 295.

For some background on our 3D-card testing methodology, we picked our test resolutions to correspond with the native resolutions of 19-inch, 22-inch, and 24-inch widescreen LCDs. The only oddball was Crysis, which, for some reason, will support the 16:9 aspect ratio common to HDTVs, but not 16:10, common to widescreen PC displays. These being the highest-end 3D cards on the market, we also picked the highest-possible image-quality settings for each game, with the exception of anti-aliasing. For AA we kept to 8x and avoided chip-specific anti-aliasing settings wherever possible, although the GTX 295 can hit up to 16x AA, depending on the game. We made a custom time demo for Left 4 Dead, but, in all other cases, we used built-in benchmarks, or, in the case of Crysis, the downloadable Assault Harbor time demo included with Mad Boris' Crysis benchmarking tool.