Since this spring, the performance crown has been in the hands of dual chip cards. Last time around ATI managed to steal the performance crown with its dual RV770 55nm card and the time has come for NVIDIA to counter ATI with its dual card. NVIDIA believed that a single monolithic GT200 65nm chip should be enough to beat the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and this time around, NVIDIA was very wrong. The dual GT200 card was not planned at the beginning, but it was kept as a last resort option, it took NVIDIA some six month to finish development of this card. The video card that we got for a preview today is the answer and it is called GeForce GTX 295, and is especially designed to strike back. - FudZilla

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 Bi-GT200 Graphics Preview

This is NVIDIA's dual chip card based on two new GT200b 55nm chips, but this time the chips are hybrid breed from a GeForce GTX 260 mother and a GeForce GTX 280 father. NVIDIA continues making its dual cards with its famous sandwich design, where two PCB's are placed at the ends of the card while the big cooler is in between them. The board is heavy, but lighter than a GeForce 9800 GX2 and it has a very interesting matte paint finish on the metal parts. The card has two 8-pin and 6-pin power connectors, and in the worst case scenario its maximal power consumption is 289W. This is just slightly worse than ATI.

This dual card has two new chips and both of them are manufactured at 55nm. It took NVIDIA quite a long time to transition to 55nm with GT200 architecture but at least they are there now. As this is a preview this means that the card will be properly launched and in sales at some point in January. Both chips are clocked at 576MHz core, 1242MHz shader clock while the memory runs at 1998MHz. The video card has a total of 1792MB of memory, which means that each chip addresses 896MB of memory. It is easy to conclude that the card has a 448-bit memory interface and that one of the chip clusters is disabled.

The full GT200 chip can support 512-bit memory and total of 1GB but this time, each chip behind the GeForce GTX 295 has 240 shaders, or processor cores how NVIDIA calls them today. When you multiply this with two you get the final number of 480 shaders. NVIDIA was also very strict and said that we can test just some games of NVIDIA's choosing and one game of our choice, simply as the ForceWare 180.x drivers are still not polished for all the other games. So a bit logic that NVIDIA narrowed the game titles down. These final driver should appear in January, at the same time the card becomes available.

Now overall NVIDIA did a good job with the GeForce GTX 295. The 55nm GT200 performs well and it's a step in the right direction. It's not very quiet, but not too loud either and the power consumption is high, but this is a top of the range card so power consumption is not a priority. However, this is not to say that it's the worst power hog around, far from it, as it consumes less than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 board in both idle and workload scenarios, which is really impressive especially after taking today's results well into consideration. And obviously, it has enough power to outperform the Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics accelerator.

But it's hard to make any sort of verdict before we see it in action with finalized drivers and, more importantly before we see the retail price. The price is what will make or break it. ATI's Radeon HD 4870 X2 sells for $550, and since a single GeForce GTX 280 board currently costs over $425. We're not sure about the GeForce GTX 295 pricing, but we're hoping it will sell for around $650. All in all it seems like the performance belt is getting back to the green corner, but we'll still wait for the final version of this card before we reach our final verdict. However, NVIDIA does have an ace up its sleeve for 2009, and that's Physx.