Top of the food chain - XFX GeForce GTX 295

Video card

By Scott Bartley / Tuesday, March 31 2009

Brand new from Nvidia is the GeForce GTX 295 video card, it’s the company’s latest high-end offering and sits at the very top of the graphics food chain, doing battle with the similarly-priced ATI Radeon 4870 X2.

Our GTX 295 review model was built by XFX and, NZ dollar fluctuations permitting, will cost around $1,200. At the time of writing this exact model was available from Playtech for $1,123.

Just as the Radeon 4870 X2 features dual GPUs, the GTX 295 uses what are basically two GeForce GTX 290 GPUs sandwiched together. This means (wealthy) gamers can buy two GTX 295 cards and run them in Quad SLI mode for the ultimate in gaming performance. In addition to the two processors, Nvidia also squeezes in 1,792MB of GDDR3 memory (that’s two lots of 896MB – one for each core), plus PhysX processing and even something called CUDA, which promises to accelerate non-gaming activities such as image processing and video encoding (provided the software being used for these tasks offers CUDA support). While both PhysX and CUDA look rather enticing on paper, in reality support for either is still in the early stages – so if you’re buying this card based on promises made by these two technologies, be aware that it may be sometime before you can fully realise their potential.

The card itself is physically massive, and, again, in this respect it is very much like the Radeon 4870 X2. In order to even attempt installation of this card your PC will need significant internal space just to fit its length. Even though it only requires a single PCI-E slot, bear in mind it’s so wide it takes up two slots simply by virtue of overhang. It’s very heavy too and needs to be bolted securely into place to prevent it putting undue stress on your motherboard. Despite the sheer bulk, the matte black box surrounding the card is a great look, very industrial-chic and gives the impression it could very well have come straight off the spaceship Nostromo – 100 PCW Points to the first reader to tell me via Twitter (twitter.com/scottbartley) which film the Nostromo was part of.

Power requirements are significant, though lessened somewhat by the fact Nvidia has manufactured the GPUs using the latest, more efficient, 55nm process. A 600W power supply is the bare minimum to get the GTX 295 running and we recommend 700W or more to be safe. The card also requires your power supply have both an 8-pin and 6-pin supplemental power connector just to plug it in.

Once the card was fully installed and sitting pretty with enough power, we set to work with the benchmarks. First up was PC WorldBench 6, our real-world application suite that measures a system’s performance relative to a baseline system by running through a series of scripted tasks in a number of applications. This tells us what kind of performance increase (if any) users can expect for many non-gaming activities. Using the exact same test rig, the GTX 295 scored marginally better than the Radeon 4870 X2 we reviewed in October (page 34).

Game testing is where it’s really at for these video cards, however, and the results were interesting to say the least. Because both the Radeon 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 295 are dual GPU solutions, their results rely heavily on the success, or lack thereof, of the way a particular game works with either SLI or CrossFire. For instance, using the racing game Race Driver GRID at high resolution with settings maxed, we found the 4870 X2 to be a solid 10% faster than the GTX 295. Yet other games such as Crysis and Fallout 3 gave a small performance edge (in the region of a few frames per second) to the GeForce GTX 295. Speaking of Crysis, this notorious system-hog of a game turned in some excellent results, squeezing 42 frames per second out of the GTX 295 (testing at 4 x AA, high quality and a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200). That’s about 10 frames per second faster than the Radeon 4870 X2.

Overall, the arms race between Nvidia and ATI is tighter than ever, but it seems that right now Nvidia may have just stolen a slender lead in the stakes to lay claim to the mantle of world’s fastest video card. But with performance between these two top cards varying from game to game this is a somewhat tenuous grip at best and may well come down to which company can write the best drivers. The bottom line, however, is that the GeForce GTX 295 is about as good as PC gaming can get right now, so if you’ve money to burn and want to build the ultimate gaming machine, then this is a card that won't disappoint.

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