Yeah, it's unexpected preview time ladies and gentlemen. It's been a while since ATI introduced their Radeon 4870 X2 graphics card, and well NVIDIA just didn't have a product around to counteract that steamy X2. Today is the day that we can lift up a big chunk of mystery that you guys have heard about in the rumor channel for a while now. It's the GeForce GTX 295. As usual, the rumors were pretty accurate. The GeForce GTX 295 will be an all new dual GPU graphics card from NVIDIA based on the 55nm GT200 derivatives. With that knowledge in mind, today we'll present you a fairly deep preview of what's to come. And NVIDIA will launch new 55nm parts at CES 2009 in Las Vegas, January 8th. - Guru3D

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Dual-GPU Graphics Preview

Much like ATI did, NVIDIA also wanted to get an early engineering sample to some selected members of the press. Since the board we received is an early production sample, the power management features were not yet finalized in the BIOS and drivers. So we will be very much focused on the physical product and of course its performance. Of course we'll compare it directly with the competing product from AMD, the mighty ATI Radeon 4870 X2, as the sole reason for the GeForce GTX 295 version to even exist is that funky red colored dual GPU based card from ATI which has until now taken over the performance crown for months.

The biggest positive for the GeForce GTX 295 for example is that it can continue on existing technology, meaning SLI. And it's exactly what is happening inside that GeForce GTX 295 graphics card, the two GPU's are bridged and SLI takes place internally, rendering your games based on profiles in the drivers, like alternate frame rendering etc. Sure, there are some snags to multi GPU based products though. And typically NVIDIA uses two PCB's which adds more overall costs to the design. Secondly, and that goes for any multi GPU based system, you can double up everything. Meaning you need a beefy system to go along.

This means you now have two GPU's that need to get rid of their heat, which requires extra cooling. You'll need more power capacity, you'll need good airflow inside that system. So indeed, not only performance doubles up, everything doubles up. And that also goes for the innards of the graphics card just as well. Now the GeForce GTX 295 is a bit of a weird combo. See, it has the memory volume and frequency of two GeForce GTX 260 cards yet the raw shader processor horsepower of two GeForce GTX 280 cards. So that makes it a bit of a hybrid in between two GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics cards.

That's still a lot of power you are consuming though, which you can frown upon. There are obviously also a couple of very interesting positives. You are adding a massive amount of horse power to your PC. Seriously it's even a little crazy when you think about it. You have twice 240 shader processor cores inside one graphics card, that's a rather incredible amount of horsepower. The fun thing with the product now is that with that much power you can also have it handle future PhysX titles really easily without dedicating a GPU to PhysX, yet keep the raw horsepower the card really has. Heck, the more effects a game has, the better.

Initially a very rough calculation lead us to believe that this product will hover around $550-600 targeted directly against the Radeon HD 4870 X2. It's better though as NVIDIA will set the launch price very agressively at roughly $499. AMD of course on their end will lower the prices of their product and that is the inevitable evolution of graphics technology versus competition. No matter what game you'll play with the GeForce GTX 295, you'll play it at dazzling frame rates, very high resolutions and the very best in image quality. We have shown you the performance of some pretty hot titles and some of the newest games around.

PhysX remains a bit of a difficult topic. Mirror's Edge will probably be the decisive factor whether PhysX will make it, or fail real hard. We like it for the fact alone that it adds additional effects and thus a better gaming experience in games. To get broad PhysX support, the game industry simply wants to see an open standard for all the graphics cards before they decide to invest programmers' resources and thus cold core cash into it. Something that will very likely happen with the arrival of DirectX 11, which has a compute shader that could carry physics directly into the API to the GPU. But enough of PhysX though.

We haven't talked about it really, there is also one another thing that might be interesting for some of you. Granted you'll have to donate a kidney to build a PC capable of it, but quad SLI with these 55nm based GeForce GTX 200 GPU's is again a possibility. Come on, that would be interesting as we've just increased the shader processor count to 960 in total. Yeah think about a good power supply for that situation before you even consider it, okay?