Nvidia announces GeForce GTX 295

Posted at: 2:00pm 18th December 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

New flagship graphics card features two GPUs, 480 stream processors and 1.792GB of memory

Speculation has been rife about Nvidia’s next dual-GPU graphics card for the last few months, and the general consensus seemed to be that even a 55nm GTX 280 would be too hot and power-hungry to pair up on one card. The more conservative rumour mill suggested that a card with two GTX 260s would be more practical, but it turns out that the final product is a bit more adventurous than that.

Called the GeForce GTX 295, Nvidia’s new dual-GPU card is a halfway meeting between a dual GTX 280 and a dual GTX 260 card. In terms of stream processors, it has the equivalent of two GTX 280 GPUs, with a total count of 480 stream processors, or 240 per GPU. However, the clock speeds have more in common with the GTX 260.

The GTX 295’s GPU cores are clocked at 576MHz, the stream processors are running at 1.242GHz and the GDDR3 memory is clocked at 999MHz (1.998GHz effective). These speeds are all exactly the same as the reference GTX 260 specs. The other feature the new GPU shares in common with the GTX 260 is its memory system. Each GPU has 896MB of memory and a 448-bit memory interface with 28 ROPs, making for a total of 1.792GB on the whole card with memory bandwidth of 224GB/sec.

The end result is a card with the parallelism of two GTX 280 chips, but the slower clock speeds of GTS 260 chips, making it practical to mount two of the new 55nm GPUs on a single PCI-E card with a 10.5in cooler. Nvidia claims that the card’s maximum TDP is 289W, which is very high, but at least within the realms of sanity for a dual-GPU card. As a point of comparison, Nvidia rates the maximum TDP of the single-GPU GTX 280 at 236W, while ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 X2 is rated at 286W. Like the aforementioned high-end cards, the GTX 295 will also require one six-pin and one eight-pin power connector.

We haven’t had a chance to test the new card for ourselves yet, but Nvidia claims that it’s an average of 26 per cent faster than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in its own tests. Running its tests on a 3.2GHz Core i7 test machine at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200, Nvidia says that the GTX 295 was 50 per cent faster in Far Cry 2 and five per cent quicker in Crysis Warhead. As always, though, these figures should be taken with a pinch of salt until we’ve run our own benchmarks. Nvidia also says that the card will be ready for Quad SLI from launch, enabling you to pair up two cards for four-GPU power.

The GeForce GTX 295 will be officially launched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) on 8 January 2009, and Nvidia estimates that it will cost around $499 US (£322.41), although no official UK pricing has been announced yet.